Spring Teaching & Learning Magazine Feb 2016

Welcome to Philips High School’S Teaching and Learning Magazine – February 2016 - Sharing ideas with teachers!

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Contents Page 1) What is Outstanding Teaching & Learning?

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2) 10 Marking & Feedback Strategies

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3) Pick ‘n’ Mix Plenary

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4) http://www.cheneyagilitytoolkit.blogspot.co.uk/

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5) Welcome to the future of teaching: are you ready?

Page 5 6) Team Shake

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7) Improve Behaviour to Improve Teachers

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8) Aspirational Marking

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9) 10 Easy Ways To Demonstrate Progress In a Lesson Page 14 10)

Feedback Before The Lesson

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In Trying To Do So Much We Do So Little

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Why not try some of the following:

Pick ‘n’ mix Plenary to encourage pupils to engage through choice!

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This is an excellent website – there are a lot of ideas in here...well worth a look...I love the request a selfie idea.... ď Š http://www.cheneyagilitytoolkit.blogspot.co.uk/

Welcome to the future of teaching: are you ready? https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/welcome-future-teaching-are-youready 29th January 2016

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By 2030 the idea of teachers suffering from a problem with worklife balance has become a footnote in histories of the Era of Industrial Education Fresh from a few days at the Bett 2016 conference in London, one teacher firmly located in 2015’s educational firmament imagines a brave new world where technology has transformed teaching Jimmy is a GCSE student. It's Monday morning and he arrives at school to begin his three hours of “normal” lessons. The night before, Jimmy has completed one hour of his compulsory, personalised online learning course for maths, which has been put together by the maths department at the start of the term. When I say “put together”, the teachers have simply dragged and dropped the relevant, pre-made “national standard” resources into Jimmy’s course space applicable to his ability level and the progress he is expected to make. He spends his hour engaging with video content, completing diagnostic quizzing and submitting answers. While working, he accessed live chat support from the maths “master teacher” who was on call for all students between 8pm and 9pm in a virtual chat room. The master teacher rotates every week and every chat session is recorded live and uploaded on to the school cloud instantly for future reference.

Anyway, that morning, Jimmy really enjoys his three hours of lessons, as he has already learnt the key content required to access them before even entering the room. With content secure, the teachers tend to spend most of their “in lesson” time facilitating the students in their application of higher order skills, challenging them to push their learning on, individually or in small groups. Jimmy’s teachers circulate the room for almost the entirety of each lesson; adding, enabling, mentoring and managing rather than dictating, delivering, entertaining and cajoling.

Jimmy finishes all his set tasks early. He politely asks the teacher to electronically certify that he has successfully completed the “in lesson” tasks. The teacher has a quick glance at his online assessment scores, marked by a virtual examiner, programmed to pick up nuances that only a robot could. Jimmy had passed with flying colours. Over time, he had realised there was no limit to how far he could go in his own learning. He wasn’t going to be held back by time frames, his peers or the confines of a particular curriculum or lesson plan. Learning was limitless. He is finding that he is receiving targeted verbal feedback from his teachers daily, both at home and at school. His parents are delighted at the attention he is receiving and wish that their own schooling had been so student-centric. Since Ofsted was abolished, the need to evidence for the sake of evidencing dissipated, allowing schools to minimise written feedback requirements and reallocate time and resources away from checking exercises.

Meanwhile, Jimmy’s friends, John and Alex, hadn’t submitted their online assignments (their class teachers had been automatically notified by email that they 6

hadn’t logged in the night before). At the start of the day, they were sent to catch up in the supervised study centre. Both had sent him a text to say they were worried they were going to be “retained”, since the government had replicated the Finnish, American and German systems and allowed schools to hold students in particular year groups or classes until sufficient progress had been made, relative to each child’s starting point. Both had pledged to work harder and engage more.

Lessons finish at lunch. At this point, the majority of staff head off into their professional development clusters for two hours of “teachmeet”-style PD, with grassroots autonomy over direction. The history department spends the afternoon discussing the different interpretations of the causes of the First World War, even taking time to read academic texts together for an hour. The science team perform an “outside the box” practical to see if it could work with the students. The art department go out of school to visit a local gallery to plan a scheme of work around it. Others spend their time marking and assessing. Heads of department decide it all.

The headteacher can see the teaching staff as his equal and implicitly trust their professional integrity, in the same way the head of a law firm would trust their lawyers. Teachers feel liberated, autonomous and encouraged. And yes – that’s two hours of teacher to teacher time every single day.

While staff are in their clusters, all 1,000 students are split into their different year groups and head to five learning hubs. They are large, sprawling spaces with highspeed wi-fi, cushions, colours and different learning areas. There are two master teachers in each zone, with 200 students and 20 support staff whose sole job is to monitor the students and administrate the afternoon. Those who need specific guidance are referred by a member of the support team to the master teacher remotely. He or she can intervene via video link instantly, whilst monitoring the screen time of all students simultaneously. Everyone wants to reach their potential and no one wants to be left behind. The culture is very much, if you want to work but need help – it’s on tap, its elite and its personal. If you don’t need help – accelerate away. However, if you “opt out” of everything, that’s your choice and parents are informed of your decision. Minimum behaviour standards are non-negotiable but behaviour for learning is completely choice-driven. Performance-related pay is a thing of the past.

All of this is only a microcosm of a larger push to ensure the UK is educationally selfsufficient against its high-flying educational rivals. In the year 2030, the value and prominence of exams has lessened significantly. Students now display their skills and experiences in a “project portfolio” on a national database charting what the young person can actually do in very implicit terms; play the piano, speak German, debate in public, choreograph dance moves or repair kitchen sinks. The curriculum has broadened incomprehensibly to allow students to tap into and pursue particular talents, using technology to facilitate that personalisation of learning. The fervent 7

growth in robotics has changed the entire shape of the job market, which is now very much dictated by what individuals can offer, not more menial requirements.

Schools and school staff have embraced this brave new world. To make the whole thing stack up, teachers were asked to forfeit four weeks of their holiday over the year. Most went for it, with many experiencing what was termed “the energy abundance” by educational bloggers. “Work-life balance” has become a footnote in histories of an era now described as “industrial education”.

In 2030, the profession has become first choice for many graduates and only the cream of the crop can enter the classroom. The cream of the teaching crop, not the academics who simply can’t teach. The status of the profession has reached new heights and young people are starting to see education as an opportunity, not a given, once again.

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Team Shake A simple app for randomly deciding teams and groups in your classes.

By Rhine-o Enterprises LLC Open iTunes to buy and download apps.

Description Team Shake provides a technological and environmentally friendly way to choose teams for board games, sporting events, tournaments, school projects or anytime groups are required. The newest release brings many new features including full iPad support, balancing teams based on skill or gender, importing users from a file, enabling video output, and sharing teams via facebook or email.

Team Shake is the premier iOS App for creating teams. Instead of a hat and scraps of paper, the user enters his friends' names in his iPhone and gives it a shake. The screen will then display a random set of color-coded teams.

These teams can immediately be used for game play or shared via facebook or email. The quick and easy selection of random (or balanced) teams eliminates fighting over who will be on which team. Innovative use of the iPhone shake gesture gives users the satisfying feeling of shaking a virtual hat without the trouble of carrying around an actual hat.

Conventional buttons can also be used for those who would rather not shake their expensive hardware about.

 The app is designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind.

Names can easily be entered with the onscreen keyboard, chosen from the user's contacts, or imported from a file. The email 9

and facebook functions document the members of each individual team as well as preserving the team number and color assigned by the app. For repeated use of Team Shake, lists of friends can be easily saved and loaded later. The current list is also automatically saved so that if you exit the app, or even reboot the device, changes will not be lost. For teachers and others with large lists of people, Team Shake supports the ability to import teams from text or csv files.

This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad 

£0.79

JANUARY 31, 2016 BY MARK MILLER

Improve behaviour to improve teachers In this blog I reveal the secret of great CPD. It’s the holy grail of teacher development and not only does it help improve the quality of our teachers, but it keeps them in the profession. It’s simple: If you want to improve teaching, sort out behaviour.

You can have great teachers, fantastic CPD and brilliantly planned lessons, but unless the behaviour system is clear, consistent and supportive, much of that goes to waste. Here is what I think schools should do about behaviour and how this helps teachers get better.

Have clear classroom expectations so that teachers can actually teach Teaching is so complicated and getting better at it is hard. Think how difficult it is to give an explanation of a concept to students who have never encountered it before. Imagine how much harder it is when nobody is looking or listening. In that situation, instead of getting better at explanations, we have to get better at something different: explanations for students who won’t listen. There’s a skill in that, but why should we have to develop that skill?

If the behaviour system is clear and supportive, teachers are not spending their time dumbing down content to make it more ‘engaging’, they’re not spending lessons negotiating with students about rules and sanctions, and they are not creating lots of individual classroom routines and consequences. Some systems have three or four steps before any kind of a sanction is given, and even then the sanction is unclear or decided by the teacher.

Our system is one warning and then a detention. It works.

There is an argument that says that relationships should come first, and that sanctions get in the way of that. Relationships are so important in teaching, it is true, but it is difficult to 10

build relationships with students who are allowed to misbehave and impossible to establish rapport with the others in the class when you are dealing with their disruptive peers.

Leave the administration of detentions to others in order to free up teachers’ time Teachers should not be arranging and manning detentions. (Then rearranging them when students inevitably don’t turn up.) We have central detentions every day, manned by SLT, and organised by admin staff. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to ensure they run smoothly, but not classroom teachers. Classroom teachers should be freed up to concentrate on what they are really good at, what they are trained for and what they are employed to do: teach. That freed up time can be used to improve teaching.

Let new teachers teach Why should it be a rite of passage that new teachers (new to the profession or new to the school) have to battle through the first few months? It’s hard enough getting used to so many new aspects and then on top you have to deal with poor behaviour. Teachers do need to learn their craft, but this applies to those of us who have been teaching for a much longer time too. If you make it easier for new teachers to teach, you ensure that students behave in their classroom in pretty much the same way they do in the principal’s classroom.

It comes back to that idea of what teachers are actually getting good at. There are all sorts of behaviour management techniques that help, even when school behaviour is generally good, but behaviour shouldn’t be all that new teachers have to think about and the only thing that improves.

Support teachers who use the school system People leave the profession because of poor behaviour, which is likely to actually be poor behaviour which is tolerated and excused by leadership teams. What makes some of this worse is the strange idea that teachers who give out detentions are bad teachers. It is a ridiculous thing to insist that teachers follow the systems and then tell them off for it. If you are struggling to teach in a school with no practicable behaviour system, then told off for trying to tackle behaviour, you will quickly start to- have to- tolerate poor behaviour and then what is the point? We should never ever blame teachers for poor behaviour. In fact, those teachers who follow the school systems should be praised and held as examples for others to see.

While a good behaviour system will have few grey areas, there may have to be some wiggle room on occasion. Sometimes there may be a pragmatic response to a situation that must be taken-professionals should be allowed to take this course where appropriate. And I don’t believe that teachers are infallible- there are times when I could have handled a situation better and de-escalated it. In a supportive culture, we can be open about our misjudgments and seek to rectify them.

I am grateful for the work that the behaviour team in my school put into allowing me to just teach. It makes my job as CPD leader much easier and it is making me a better classroom teacher. Behaviour isn’t perfect (because it is a school!) but everything is in place to allow for good behaviour, and good behaviour leads to great teaching. http://thegoldfishbowl.edublogs.org/2016/01/31/improve-behaviour-to-improve-teachers/ 11

Aspirational Marking Resources: A good awareness of your mark scheme!

What to do: Instead of giving students a final grade and mark for their piece of work/assessment/mock exam and so on, try giving them the number of marks they are off the next grade instead.

Do not put any mention of their current grade. (Although, obviously, they can figure out their current grade by working out how many marks they are off their next grade!)

The idea is to promote aspirational leaps of students believing the next grade/step is achievable and indeed doable!

How many marks you need for a C- 3 How many marks you need for a B- 8 How many marks you need for an A- 13 How many marks you need for an A*- 18

Variations: When giving students feedback on edited/corrected work, (DIRT time tasks), only record how many marks they have improved their work by.

Post by Head of English at my School- Jamie K. 12

This post is a result of my two minute presentation that I recently gave at the Teachmeet at Acklam Grange School in Middlesbrough. It is one of those things that student teachers ask me all the time. How can I show progress quickly when I am being observed? I think that sometimes, people tend to over think this, as progress can be shown in a lesson very easily. So here are my ten easy ways to do this: 1. Progress Clocks are very simple. Students are issued with a template of a blank clock. The clock face is divided into four, each quarter represents twenty minutes of the lesson. The first part is to find out what the students know about a topic. This could be a completely new topic or one that you taught last lesson and are going to expand upon. The clock is revisited throughout the lesson and used a mini plenary check. Students use this alongside success criteria so they can see themselves how much progress they are making and what they need to do to achieve the next level.

2. Mini Mysteries are used when you want the students to learn independently and demonstrate progress. In History, we use evidence packs that allow the pupils to work together in groups – good for differentiation. They are also provided with a key question. For example, “What was happening at Grafeneck Asylum?”. Students then have to come up with an answer and complete a concept map to show their thinking. This allows them to share their ideas with the rest of the group. Based on what is then discussed in the class, groups are given the opportunity to change their original judgment.

The answer is revealed and students have to connect the event to their prior learning. I usually do this in the form of a piece of extended writing.

3. Three Tiers of Progress. This is a visual way for the students to see the progress that they are making in the lesson. It can be a display board in the classroom or simply a template displayed on a power point slide. The board is divided into three horizontal columns, each column containing the title “Novice, Apprentice and Expert”.Students either have small pictures of themselves or just their name and move themselves into the category that best suits them at that particular time in the lesson. Students should be using the success criteria in the lesson to move themselves higher up the tiers – the aim is to become an expert in the topic by the end of the lesson.

4. Progress Checker. This can be a laminated card that can be issued at any point during the lesson. It contains statements that allow students to comment on their progress at different points of the lesson. Examples of 13

statements are “I feel confident about my progress in this lesson because….”, “The thing that I have found most difficult in this lesson so far is …..”. Statements can be adapted for any subject. Students complete the statements in their book so there is evidence of clear progress.

5. Are you making progress this lesson? This is best done with a smaller class or where you have the advantage of having a teaching assistant with you. It simply involves giving a red, amber or green dot with a marker pen in the student’s book against a statement that they have made. It is an excellent way to start the lesson. In History, I use it with the bell activity which is usually the key question. The coloured dot represents correct knowledge – red means totally incorrect, amber, some of it is right but it needs improving and green is correct. Students are obviously aiming towards the green dot somewhere during the lesson to show that they now fully understand.

6. Mr Wrong Paragraphs. Students are given paragraphs that contain deliberate mistakes. This task is used to check understanding of knowledge or for spotting literacy errors. However, I often use it as a combination of the two as there is so much emphasis placed on improving literacy in every subject. This could be used to check for understanding of knowledge or used for spotting literacy errors (or a combination of the two).

7. Enquiry Based Learning or KWL Charts. These are similar to the progress clocks in that they check what the students already know, what they would like to know by the end of the lesson and what they have learnt during the lesson. They need to be used in conjunction with the lesson objectives so that the right questions can be asked.

8. Tactical Titles. What can be easier than having the student write a title in their book such as, ‘What I know now’, ‘Pre-assessment’, ‘Draft 1’, ‘First attempt’? Students complete the relevant information under each title. The more they are used throughout their books, it becomes very easy to see that progress over time has been demonstrated.

9. Exit Tickets. Most teachers will have used these in one way or another. Some use post-it notes for a student to write down what they have learnt during the lesson. Mine are a printed ticket for each students that are handed out towards the end of the lesson. They contain the titles, “Three things that I have learnt, Two questions that I would like to ask and one final reflection”.

Exit tickets help with the planning of the following lesson as you can get a good idea of which aspects of the lesson the students did not fully understand.

10. Marking and Feedback . I know – this is what we all hate the most! Detailed marking is time consuming but I truly believe it is the best way for students to make progress. I use the system of including an empty yellow box after a piece of written work. I give feedback in the form of “What went well” and “Even better if ” comments. It is the responsibility of the student to act upon the comments given and make the improvements in the highlighted yellow box. The box also highlights the progress that the student has made.

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Students act upon their feedback at the beginning of the next lesson. We call this “DIRT” time – dedicated improvement and reflection time.

So there you have it. Ten easy ways to show progress in a lesson. I would expect that there are many more which we do on an everyday basis without even thinking about it. Why don’t you add to my list?

http://ukedchat.com/2015/03/13/10-easy-ways-todemonstrate-progress-in-a-lesson-byagshistory/?utm_source=ReviveOldPost&utm_medium=social &utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost

Doug Lemov's field notes Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

FEEDBACK BEFORE THE LESSON

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Imagine for a minute a school that provides lots of useful feedback to teachers. Perhaps this describes your own school. Trusted colleagues and peers frequently see you teach. They have a shared vision of successful teaching that aligns to your own in large part and they take time to give you concrete practical advice to help you get a little better. They see you teach often enough that they know the true you and aren’t thrown off too much by any one data point. They know the true you and help you think about whether the best version of yourself came out in each lesson.

Sounds like the perfect learning environment for teachers, right? But my colleague Katie Yezzi has been pushing me to think of some ways that even this lovely setting could be better.

Feedback, she observed recently, is great after a lesson but it’s even better before a lesson. When teachers and leaders invest time and brainpower in reviewing lesson plans and practicing lessons before they get taught rather than giving feedback on lessons that already happened these things are likely to happen: As a teacher, getting feedback on a lesson to ensure its success ahead of time is incredibly practical, actionable and supportive. It means I go into my lessons more confident and prepared. That sounds like a great way to feel at work each day.

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As a coach, it seems like a powerful use of my skills and abilities to engage with teachers about lessons to come, to dig deeply into the content and the “why” of the lesson. It also positions me more as a partner in the work, rolling up my sleeves to work out the lessons in advance.  Haven’t we all walked in to observe lessons only to find that something is being taught wrong? Then as a coach we have few options, and often have to jump in to ensure students don’t have to later unlearn and relearn the correct version. That usually doesn’t make teacher or coach love their job. Catching the errors before they happen achieves our goals of teacher and student success.  All teachers want to do well in the classroom, and in this system they use the knowledge of their instructional leader and colleagues in the best possible way. They enter a practice session highly motivated and therefore receptive to feedback given during practice that will lead them to success in the big game. Even a teacher who is eager to hear feedback about a previous lesson most likely doesn’t seek or receive that feedback with the same urgency.

So how could you do this? How might you get feedback before you teach? Here are five ideas.

1. Lesson plan review. Teacher brings lesson plan he or she is going to teach soon. Supervisor, mentor, partner, dept chair, or principal gives feedback in one on one session 2. Lesson plan review group protocol. Department or grade-level team gets together.

One or two teachers present their lessons for 30 mins a get feedback. It might look like this: o Teachers sit in a circle. o Teacher presenting lesson describes background, context and objective of lesson for three minutes o Colleagues go in order around the circle and ask clarifying questions if they have them (they should “pass” if not). A clarifying question is NOT one in which the asker gives his or her opinion by disguising it as a question: “Did you think about including more guided questions?” They are questions with a factual answer that the asker does know the answer to (e.g. what was your objective the day before this lesson? the day after? How many students do you have in the class? How long have you been studying this topic? How long is the class period. The teacher presenting the lesson can answer these questions but all parties must be fast. There’s three minutes in all. o Colleagues go around the circle in order and identify “glows” about the lesson. Their goal is to speak for 30 seconds but the maximum is a minute. After that the moderated says :time.” They describe things they thought were effective. Their goal is not to make their colleague feel better but to be very specific in explaining why so their colleague knows what things to replicate and to some degree why. This round goes for ten minutes and it keeps going even if all participants have passed once. The person presenting may not reply to any of the comments. o Colleagues go around the circle in the same manner but this time identify “grows” or “might haves”–what are potential misunderstandings? things that might go wrong? descriptions that aren’t clear? missing step? other things the teacher might try?

Again the goal is to speak for 30 seconds but the maximum is a minute.This round, too, goes for ten minutes and it keeps going even if all participants have passed once. Again, the person presenting may not reply to any of the comments. 

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The session ends with five minutes for the presenter to reply to all of the feedback: what resonated most? What themes did he or she hear? What changes will he or she make?

3. Hybrid Practice Session. Teacher brings lesson plan he or she is going to teach soon. Supervisor, mentor, partner, dept chair, or principal gives feedback in one on one session. Teacher and colleague choose some key areas, perhaps a critical stretch of questioning. Teacher practices and gets feedback.

4. Lesson study. Teacher teaches a portion of the lesson for a group of colleagues before teaching it to students. Gets feedback.

5. Plan for Error Session. Teacher writes up a plan describing two likely student errors that might occur during a key portion of the lesson and what he or she might do about them if they did occur. Discussion and role play with mentor, colleague etc.

- See more at: http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/coaching-and-practice/deptgame-changing-ideas-feedback-lesson/#sthash.ZUWreGPE.dpuf o

http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/coaching-and-practice/dept-game-changingideas-feedback-lesson/

In trying to do so much we do too little Posted on January 20, 2016 by Andy Tharby

Recently, I asked a class of top-set year 11s to identify the verbs in a piece of writing. It was a seemingly simple activity that I had given them a few minutes to complete, yet it quickly became clear from the blank faces I was met with that my request had posed something of a problem: after five years of secondary school, a sizeable proportion of the group did not know what a verb was.

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How many times in 11 years of schooling must they have encountered the term before?

How many times must they have heard the word uttered from a teacher’s lips or seen it written up on a board? Yet despite numerous exposures, this relatively simple concept, one probably within the capacity of a bright 5 year-old, had slipped away and had hardly been grasped at all. Of course, the humble verb is but the tip of the iceberg; the number of completely learnable terms and concepts which I have exposed my students to and they have have not learnt is too numerous to list.

This realisation, that so much of what I have taught has not been learnt, has been steadily dawning on me over the past year or so. It has set in motion a strange and vertiginous feeling, akin perhaps to trudging for many miles across a plateau in the hope of finding a place to spend the night, only to find oneself standing at the edge of a plunging, bottomless abyss.

Much has gone before, in my classroom and in others. Curricular have been jammed with sparkling ideas and concepts; lessons have overflowed with activities and ingenious new strategies; every inch of white board has been crammed with text and pictures and diagrams. Exercise books have been filled with words; hours of discussion have ricocheted between the classroom walls; synapses have sparked and connected in their billions. But still it is the same. So many children leave school knowing far less than we would hope them to.

The reasons for this are complex. Anybody who tries to tell you that there is one cause is wrong. Anybody who finds solace in an ideological or scientific explanation is probably only telling you half the story. Society, motivation and development all play a part, but I still think one of the causes has its roots in both curriculum and pedagogy. There is a paradox here: in trying to do so much we do too little.

My theory is that we try to throw too much at children, and that this is why so little of it sticks. A basic understanding of cognitive load theory can help us to conceptualise why overstuffing lessons and curricular does not work. The human working memory – the part of the brain that processes new information – can only cope with a limited number amount of new information at one time. When it becomes ‘overloaded’, there is no room left to think, which can then prevent new information from reaching the destination it needs to get to: the long-term memory, where it can be stored indefinitely. (Alex Quigley usefully sums up how this works in this post on thinking hard.)

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There are other reasons, too. One, which I have dubbed the as-the-crow-flies-error, lies in asking students to perform complex skills, like analysing a writer’s style, before being secure in the knowledge needed to be able to do this, such as understanding the text’s plot or comprehension of the writer’s language.

The recent drive to increase the level of ‘challenge’ in lessons is an important one, but only if this challenge is focused and achievable. I would argue that we should always aim for more depth and less breadth. Drawing on international comparisons, Tim Oates argues – here – that teachers should look to expand upon the current idea before progressing to the next ones. Take one idea and examine it in depth, rather than let five or six ideas be touched upon superficially. A concern with this approach, some might argue, is that it does not benefit our more-able students who will be forced to remain with topics that they are ready to move on from. However, with good planning and more imaginative and stretching questions, our more-able students might well benefit more from this approach than any other.

The beauty of this way of thinking is that we might achieve more success by doing less work than we already do. By stepping back, by deciding on what is most important (and then going home a little earlier) could we go some way towards helping students to learn things more securely?

What follows are the things I am currently working on in my role as English teacher; the principle behind them all, however, could extend into all aspects of school life: 

Plan to teach only 1 or 2 new vocabulary words or concepts per lesson.

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Give less feedback – i.e. set one target, not two, but give time and space over a number of lessons to work on it.

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Limit the number of success criteria, or procedural processes, that students work on in one go. (I have a habit of asking students to do 5 or 6 new things in their work; it works better to use fewer so that they can really think about them.)

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If a slide show is to be used, cut down the number of words per slide, and cut down the number of total slides . If they have to read something from the slide, allow time for that.

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Plan for two or three tasks per lesson, no more. Revisit the same material but in slightly different ways.

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Decide on the key, essential knowledge that must not be forgotten. Teach it, revisit it, test it … and repeat. Joe Kirby’s knowledge organisers provide a useful model of how this could be organised.

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Teach a bit, let the students write a bit. Teach a bit, write a bit. Teach a bit, write a bit. Lesson over.

Ultimately, all this is about prioritisation, about separating the wheat from the chaff – and then ensuring that the wheat is learnt well.

And if you are prepared to take this jump, perhaps you will have the spare time to start visiting friends, reading books, doing the things you enjoy and, dare I say it, forgetting about work. https://reflectingenglish.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/in-trying-to-do-so-much-we-dotoo-little/

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