At Crookhorn we put tremendous value in the way our classrooms look and how they should help our students learn. Over the last three years, we have had the ‘clear the clutter’ campaign to make sure our classrooms are clean, tidy and professional and I think this has had a significant influence on how our classrooms look today. We have also asked our teachers to really consider what is displayed on the walls, so they support students and teachers with some key, fundamental aspects of their learning.

Classroom environments can both support and enrich the learning of all children.  As well as being rich, enabling and welcoming, the classroom environment can be a learning tool, a way of engaging children and building the class community. It can create a sense of ownership and be used to support and promote learning as well as celebrating children’s work. With thought and planning an effective classroom environment is used as an interactive resource supporting teaching, learning and assessment.

I think the first consideration when planning the learning environment for your classroom is that what you put up around the room can really help set the mood of your room. It’s no secret that schools can be quite daunting places for many students. Having a calm, visually appealing learning environment can go a long way to helping students feel welcome and valued. We have promoted the fact that our classrooms should be SEN friendly, especially with the fact that 25% of our cohorts have recognised barriers to learning. Natalie has done training for us recently on some of the strategies and I urge you to look back over the Power Point I have attached to familiarise yourself with her guidance. The key ideas being for us to analyse our seating plans carefully to make sure the SEN students are in an appropriate place so teachers can easily access them and key vocab with definitions on the walls which students can quickly access.

The second consideration is that we should consider displays as learning tools and not distractions. One of the best things about children, in my opinion, is their ability to absorb knowledge like a sponge. It’s vital that students are exposed to content in as many ways as possible while they’re at College. We know that students can often absorb information subconsciously from visual prompts when they are tested in other spaces. Whether it be information walls, thought-provoking posters, or simple diagrams, your students will appreciate the reminders when their knowledge and understanding requires consolidation.

That being said – you can’t just jam-pack your walls with information! Research also suggests that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. Research by Fisher, Goodwin and Seltman showed that children can be more distracted by the visual environment, spend more time off task and demonstrate smaller learning gains when the walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed. It is important to avoid clutter! Keep at least 20 percent of your wall space clear, and leave ample space between displays so they don’t look disorganized. Resist the temptation to keep adding displays; it’s better to swap them rather than keep adding more.

So what do you do? How do you find the right balance?

If you are going to be teaching and directing your students’ attention toward a particular place quite regularly (such as the whiteboard), it’s a good idea to limit the content around this area. This allows students to more easily focus their attention on you. This area should be restricted to just the vital learning tools that you often need students to remember!

The areas where children will not be receiving direct instruction, such as the side walls and the back of the classroom are often spaces that can be used. It is important to direct the students to the relevant learning wall when appropriate.

It is essential that any print placed on your walls can be read!  If in doubt, do the squint test.  Stand about six feet away from your board and squint at it.  If you can’t see the key words or read the definitions of what the key words mean then there is very little chance the students can either which means then the learning wall becomes redundant.

When creating a language-rich classroom, learning walls are particularly valuable. The language used within them sets the standard for the vocabulary we want our students to use. So, what are some good ideas for language-rich displays?    

Word walls have long been a classroom staple, but how do we decide which words to showcase? An effective display should be clearly organised; it shouldn’t just be a messy collage of random terms. The words we want to focus are referred to as tier 2 and tier 3 words (Academic word list). Tier 2 vocabulary consists of tricky words that are regularly used by mature language users, found and used in any subject across the curriculum. Tier 3 vocabulary, on the other hand, refers to subject-specific terminology, like onomatopoeia or evaporation. A great idea is to build your walls around tier 2 or 3 words that relate to themes or topics that you are exploring in class. If you are teaching maths and doing averages you might want to create a learning wall around tier 3 terms like ‘median’, ‘mode’ and ‘range’. 

One of the best ways of preparing your class for new language is through familiarising them with common roots and affixes. Once a student understands that the prefix ‘min-’ means ‘small’, they’ll be able to independently see the links between words like “minion” and “minor”. There are many strategies and templates you can get from the internet which can be used to help you plan out a learning wall for promoting these words.

It was noted by OFSTED that our learning walls are very effective resources to support and check that students understand the work. They also stated that classrooms are used well by pupils, particularly pupils with SEND to help them with their work. Our learning environments are crucial to making sure students are supported in the classroom but they are only effective if you refer to them, you make them relevant to your learners and they are easy to access for all students.

My thanks as always for taking the time to read this and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

This month, I am very privileged to have a guest writer for the teaching and learning blog, as Carl Jones-Taylor has stepped into my shoes and has written the blog for April. As you all know, Carl is our assistant Head of House and also a fine tutor and is presently studying for his master’s qualification. Carl has a real passion for developing metacognition within Crookhorn and this month’s blog describes what he has learnt so far and some of the key aspects he has brought into his own teaching to help to improve his students learning habits. Carl, the floor is yours…
 

Metacognition is defined as “higher-order thinking that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one’s cognitive processes, especially when engaged in learning.”

Metacognition is unpicking the process with the students of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

When I first started looking at Metacognition and what it entailed, I spent a long time trawling through various websites looking for something that would fit.  Eventually, I decided to use the Education Endowment Foundation.  This was for a number of reasons.  This organisation was established to provide validity and reliability to research carried out in education.  If I was going to find something it needed to be worthwhile and valid. They claim that: ‘Metacognition and self-regulation approaches have consistently high levels of impact, with pupils making an average of seven months’ additional progress.’  As a concept, this can be applied to any subject, any lesson and even added to our MTPs.  Taking it even further, the students can then start making cross-curricular links. The second reason I chose this variation was the simplicity of the process.  Trying to encourage disadvantaged students to invest their time in anything is challenging so the simple nature of this version helps. The following diagram helps really understand how metacognition should be used with students in the classroom and how we can get students to really evaluate, plan and monitor their own work.

The final reason for this decision was that the cyclical process means that the students don’t just stop once they have completed a task or topic.  The whole thing is not a linear process that stops once they have ‘done it’.  It encourages them to revisit the skills or knowledge, especially as part of a spiral curriculum.  I have used this structure in a lesson with Year 7.  All of them could tell me when they had previously attempted a similar task before immediately opening their books to find it.  They were then able to tell me what worked last time and what they need to work on.  They don’t have a teacher telling them everything in an exam; they need to be able to think for themselves.  Resilience and flexibility can be developed by them having to think for themselves whilst making the links between prior learning and what they are doing now. 

One of the most important aspects of this strategy is the teacher modelling how to use this structure.  My tutor group have seen me attempting science and maths explaining my thought processes as I go.  Explicitly teaching how to use this method is also essential as it demonstrates the necessary and appropriate level of dialogue expected of the student.

It takes time for these skills to embed.  Metacognition is not a quick or instant fix.  It is a strategy that needs to be developed over time to ensure the students can use it naturally becoming part of their thought process when faced with any task.

I want to thank Carl for writing this extremely interesting blog and I know he will be highly involved with Dave Lemon in extending the use of the metacognition strategies within tutor time which I truly believe will help develop the Crookhorn learner for years to come. If anyone else is keen to write a guest blog on an area of teaching and learning please do contact me as I know there is so much expertise and passion within our teaching staff on different topics that we would all find interesting, especially after all the educational reading done recently in staff training.

Our coaching programme is one of the main tactics we use at Crookhorn to develop our vision of teaching and learning towards ‘Excellence as Standard’. Last year 92% of the teaching staff felt that coaching had a positive impact on their practice in the classroom. This is obviously great and what we now need to focus on, is the benefits now becoming embedded into our daily practice. We know as a teaching body, our GCSE results have been disappointing over the last couple of years, and the only way we are going to improve these results is to improve the quality of teaching provision our students receive on a regular basis.

Every term, we meet as a group of coaches and discuss the key coaching themes moving forward and also recapping some of the essential techniques we have been working on with staff. In our training this term we looked at some more strategies used in ‘Teach like a Champion’.  The first is Cold call which is where we target students for our well thought out planned questions, moving away from hands up as this often allows students to hide in a lesson and let certain students dominate. This is also one of the strategies to check if students have actually learnt what you have taught them. Check for understanding has been promoted through how we use mini whiteboards, exit tickets and other questioning techniques. We also discussed if we were seeing staff moving towards live marking in the classroom as we know this has a real benefit to our students. The students often tell us that this type of feedback, which is short, sharp and in the moment really helps them. At Academic Board last week, we discussed the worrying performance of the boys and disadvantaged students in GCSE’s, and the research shows us that when we use these techniques I have recapped above, it has a positive and substantial effect on their performance. In a recent Blink, it was stated that in too many classes, the boys ‘have a place to hide’ because our teachers are not targeting them with questions or checking what they have learnt. Reflect on your own practice now, are these strategies really established in your teaching and if not, what do you need to do to make it embedded? If you feel the students are not making the required progress in your lessons would some of these strategies help if you focus on making them part of your daily routine?

In my last blog, I wrote about how we must improve our student’s vocabulary and some ideas on how to do this. In our examination system in the UK, the amount of writing and quality of writing will determine the academic success of our students. As coaches, we discussed the strategy of Show Call which is a technique where a teacher uses student work to project on the screen and students and the teacher give feedback on what was done well, and what can be done to improve. This is developing the idea of a ‘culture of error’ and also gives students live feedback on how to improve their work. When you use this technique, think carefully about what works to choose, is it exemplary, or does it demonstrate a common error; or does it have a good balance of strengths and weaknesses that will be good to go through. Planning where you use show call, is essential. This might be after a section of writing has been completed, after a reteach and rewrite on a piece of writing, or maybe partway through a task- to give the students quick feedback and help them make quick progress. Consider also how many students you will choose to show call. If you have not used one of the college visualisers yet, please speak to your HOS who should have access to one. Our aim is to make sure all teachers have a visualiser so we can all be using them as part of our routine.

I know a fear we have at Crookhorn is how we get students to write for a sustained period of time and also producing a high-quality piece of writing. As a result, we need to think about building up their stamina for writing just as you would build stamina for running or swimming: start small and scale up. Make the initial task about one minute’s worth of writing and make that expectation clear. You can add that by the end of the next lesson, you know the students will be writing confidently for at least 5 minutes, and it will not be stressful to them, because you will be training them in small steps. The most important thing is to have students’ practice being successful at writing steadily through a block of time when asked to, not only because seeing themselves succeed convinces students that they can, but because it makes a habit of writing steadily through the time allotted whenever asked. The idea is that when you say go, they write straight through because they can’t imagine anything else!

Another way to make sure students hit the ground running is to make sure they have some decent ideas to work from, making it all but impossible to fall back on “I can’t think of anything.” Before you say go, ask students to do a lightning-quick mind map and two-minute discussion. Then, very quickly, say “Now that you’ve got some ideas, you may begin. Go.” Give them the expectation that their pen should be moving for the majority of the time (let them know that there will be pauses for thought and student reflection if needed). This is useful because it’s visible and therefore clear and easy to manage on your end.

Writing is one of the most effective ways to process information, but all too often we run out of time for that end-of-class reflection.  Instead, try building in time at the beginning of class for writing.  Following your teacher input, allow students to write about the objective or concept, and then build in time for students to discuss their written thoughts with one another.  Creating a space for writing at the beginning of the class, as opposed to the tail end of class, gives priority to the importance of writing and allows you valuable check for understanding time as well, that might help shape how the rest of the lesson is facilitated. If a student has not put in the required effort, you have the time for an immediate rewrite. As teachers, we often accept mediocrity as we are just happy they have done it, but we must all get better at saying that at times, that is not good enough and that they must do it again. This is a key learning process, and we must not shy away from it.

We finished off our coaching training at looking at the ‘Door to Do now’ technique. This is making sure we have an efficient and effective way of making sure students enter the class and then start work immediately. Meet them at door, expectations are made and make sure all materials needed for them are on their desk. The students have a clear seating plan that they know, and the first task is in place for them to be getting on with.

There are many research papers and studies about improving boys’ performances over the last 50 years. There are also thousands and thousands of articles about how to improve disadvantaged students’ academic achievements. They all agree that the biggest influence on improving these groups of students is quality first teaching. We all entered education to make a difference and we have chosen to work at a College like Crookhorn because we know we can positively change lives through education, and we will do that through the high-quality provision that what we deliver in the classroom. Please give these strategies and techniques a real go, work on them on every lesson you teach and talk to your coach if you are struggling to embed them in your daily practice.

You can click on any of the blue links which will take you straight through to extra reading on the strategies discussed. Any feedback on the blog, or just how you are getting along in your teaching is always gratefully received.

Many of our students are about to receive their mock results. For some, this will be a time for them to feel relieved that their efforts so far have paid off. For others, they won’t be happy with their result. Ultimately, the result itself doesn’t really matter. It’s how the students respond to their result that counts. The hope is that our students will find the balance between fear of failure and over-confidence in order to best prepare them for their final exams. In this post, I explain the methods I and others have used to ensure that students respond positively so that they will achieve their desired result in the future. The importance of giving effective feedback has never been more pertinent in this pressing time of their school careers.

Effective feedback from you will include the specific achievable steps (targets) to improve their performance. For example, the use of technical vocab, the identification of knowledge gaps, fluency, evaluation skills and ineptness of planning might all be included in your feedback. If a student is missing most of these, you have to give them a place to start.

Students’ lack of engagement with these steps/targets you give them also seems to be caused by their own perceptions of themselves as learners. They often see themselves as a “grade 4” student, for example. This makes it harder for them to come to terms with any grade that doesn’t fit with that label. Following a positive result, they can then become idle in their success. A negative result can leave students thinking it can’t be done. It’s vital that we spend time before giving feedback to help students understand what they should be looking to achieve, both in terms of short and long-term practices. They need to know and be constantly reminded that ‘progress‘ is not linear and that their path to success will not be a straight one.

Students need to see the bigger picture. One exam result can seem like the entire picture to some of the students. In order for these steps of feedback to be meaningful to your students, they need to understand their own learning situation. By this, I mean that your students need to be able to see what their current level of achievement looks like compared to their past achievements. Have they dipped? Plateaued? Accelerated? Where are they going? And how is this related to their end goal?

They should also be made aware of how far a student like them should be expected to achieve by the end of the course. Think about some of your students from previous years who have achieved similar mock results, but have then gone on to have even greater success when they have followed a specific plan. Share that plan with your current students, breaking it down into practical steps, which when followed, led to your previous student achieving the desired result.

By making the steps simple, your current students are able to see further progress as realistic. This provides them with the motivation required to increase performance in preparation for the exam. Because the feedback conversation is focused on future achievement, rather than past failure, your student’s mindset is far more receptive and they should react more positively.

Additionally, students need to feel supported. Many students’ will know that a poor result is their ‘fault’, but guilt and remorse will only make them dwell on negatives. This distracts from the positives and creates a barrier to forming a solution-focused mindset. Instead, ensure you are giving effective feedback by using as many comments as possible about what your students have achieved. By beginning the feedback conversation in this way (and feedback must be a conversation, not just one-way) your students will be encouraged to feel as though they have a platform to build upon for future success. They will also see you as being on their side, rather than just being there to find faults.

What actions can we take to prepare our students to receive feedback? I think it is important for students to consider some questions before they receive their mock papers back. Here are some questions I would consider asking:

1. What do you stand to gain from success in this subject?
2. What is your end-of-course target?
3. What was your target for the mock exam?
4. If your two targets are different, then explain why
5. What practical steps did you take to move towards your mock exam target?
6. Which of those practical steps paid off?
7. Which practical steps would you change or not use again? Explain your reasons.
8. If you could go back in time and give advice to yourself three months ago, what advice would you give?

Many of these I have got from Sander when he has been working with the students in his MADE sessions. You may change the wording of the questions, or even add/remove some of them. However, it is fundamental that we as a teaching team create a dialogue with each student about their own journey. The questions are really just conversation starters.

After giving feedback on the mock exams, it’s crucial that you put a plan in place to ensure that every single student can be monitored and so that their performance on exam day is not left to chance. The plan should be specific, realistic and time-bound if it is to work. But most importantly, the onus should be on the students to solve the problem. You will need to use the mocks to see where the gap in learning is specific to one or two students or where it has a broader base, which requires a rethink of future planning. What material are they struggling to commit to long-term memory? How will you help facilitate this?

Steps you can put in place:

• Students should respond to feedback as early as possible – create improved answers or redo the mock exam from scratch.
• Set aside specific times for one-to-one conversations with each student (if logistically possible). This should happen as soon as possible.
• Share results with colleagues in other departments and the Head of House to see if there is an issue beyond your subject.
• Students should create an action plan for the final exams. This can contain exam dates, when they will begin revising, successful revision methods, any future assessment dates.
• Book another one-to-one for 6 weeks time to see how students have got on individually. Did they bother to stick to the plan? Where’s the evidence? Did it work? How do they know? What do they now need to focus on? Is parental involvement necessary at this point?

This summer I read a really powerful article called ‘Great teaching, the power of expectations’ by Tom Sherrington. I felt that the article was particularly pertinent to what we are trying to achieve at Crookhorn College and I have used this as the basis of this month’s blog so you also get a chance to reflect on what he has written. The vision Sarah outlined at the start of the term about expectations and standards must be the bedrock of what we deliver at Crookhorn and I hope you find this article useful. Please let me know your thoughts.

As each new term approaches, it’s worth reflecting on the powerful Bill Rogers concept that, as teachers, ‘you establish what you establish’.  This means:

• If we establish that we expect high standards and reinforce them continually with tight routines in lessons characterised by rigour, depth, drive and a clear sense of purpose, that is what we get.  If we establish that we will insist on polite, respectful interactions, listening to whoever is speaking and acting in a supportive, mature fashion, then students will learn the boundaries and respond.
• Conversely, if we establish that, despite our intentions, in reality, we’ll let things go, accept mediocrity, sloppy writing, half-finished work and allow lessons to drift without addressing the behaviour issues, then that is what we get.  If we establish that calling out, ‘low-level disruption’ and rudeness will go under-challenged or only weakly addressed, these become embedded behaviours all too easily.

We establish what we establish.

Having high expectations, communicating them and reinforcing them is such a powerful feature of great teaching.  When you sweat the small stuff, make the details count; show that you really believe that excellence is possible from everyone – the pay-off is significant.  It sounds obvious but it can be easier said than done. Let’s explore the details.  Where do expectations come into play?  Here are four examples:

Behaviour management.

There are hundreds of details to this but teachers’ expectations are the absolute bedrock of creating a fertile learning environment where everyone feels safe and can engage in productive learning with a teacher firmly in control and able to lead great questioning exchanges.   There are teachers who command enormous respect from students for being someone ‘you don’t mess with’; someone whose lessons are characterised by warmth, encouragement, friendliness but also complete order, discipline and high expectations.

When you observe a teacher who has mastered this aspect of the craft, it’s interesting to note that, nearly always, their expectations are enforced at the earliest lowest levels. They’re not shouters; it’s not about being angry or over-controlling.  It’s about firm, warm, insistence:  sustained eye contact, a firm look, gesture or gentle command – keeping everyone listening, focused, attentive, picking up on drifting.  There are teachers that students don’t want to be late for, whose lessons you don’t call out in, where you definitely take all your equipment.  Not because of fear or because you’ll get a detention; but simply because it’s expected.  A teacher’s personal disapproval and botheredness is the most significant consequence.  Of course, you need to back this up with other consequences if necessary but that’s not where you start.

At the beginning of a term, the key is to establish the expectations with routine rehearsals: how we enter class; how we move around in the space; how we conduct questioning sessions; how we show respect for each other… all the details.  And then you have a clear framework to reference… “remember our rule – One voice” – and so on.

The pitch of the curriculum content and resources.

Tom has written about this in various blogs including ‘The Anatomy of High Expectations’ and ‘Stretch and Challenge ‘.  The pitch of your curriculum materials is a concrete expression of your expectations.  If you set students the task of doing a gentle intro cover page, colouring in a diagram of the safety apparatus, the message is different from setting them something with depth to it.  His son’s first homework at secondary school asked the question ‘what’s the difference between science and philosophy’.  If you want students to learn a poem or speech by heart, they can – but you need to expect it first.   If you want them to engage in a French conversation without using their notes, making them delve deep with their retrieval practice, they’ll respond – but if you don’t expect them to be able to do it, they never will. High expectations take form in what you ask students to read and the topics you select: never patronising; never dumbed-down.  Pitched up, bold and demanding – that’s the way to go.

Attention to detail and depth in responsive questioning.

This is an area for daily consideration.  The way you respond to students’ answers embodies your expectations.  It’s always ok for students to offer half-form responses, to be unsure or not to know something.  But…it’s not ok to leave it there.  If we expect students to know things, to form details answers and give in-depth responses, we need to lead them in that direction through probing questioning and the ‘say it again better’ strategy explored in the previous post on questioning.   If you accept poor answers without response or simply flit from student to student getting bits and pieces of responses, you set a low standard for the depth of thinking.  If you always probe, go deeper and insist on higher quality answers as a follow-up, you set a standard that students aspire to.  For me, this shift is one of the most significant in teaching:  something you do every single day to drive up standards in learning at a fundamental level.

The standards of student work.  Quality, volume, depth

As with questioning, setting expectations in terms of students’ work output is essential. Unless you spell it out in advance, you leave them to guess.  It pays to explore this upfront. “If you do work that I think is awesome, what will it look like?” Setting out the parameters for length, depth and key features of what excellence looks like is extremely helpful as a guide.

But then you need to respond to what you get.  If you don’t seem bothered about hand-writing, joined and on the lines and full stops and capital letters, it deteriorates.  If you don’t insist on ruled lines and pencils for diagrams, it falls away.  If you don’t insist that maths problems are set out with a new line for each step, attention to columns and giving quantities with the correct units, these details cease to be routine.

If the first draft is unacceptable — doing it again is a powerful first step to setting standards.

If I ask children about the teachers they’ve loved and respected, for sure there is a correlation to those who set high expectations.  It’s a powerful motivator; the teacher is bothered; they believe in you; they know you can achieve excellence – and, yes, they’re unashamedly demanding about it.

Over the last couple of weeks, Sarah and I have spent some considerable time speaking and interviewing prospective candidates who want to come and teach at Crookhorn. Whenever I am asked to describe teaching and learning here at Crookhorn, I tell the candidates we concentrate on 3 key elements, which are planning good lessons, giving our students the best possible feedback on how to improve and then working on becoming better teachers in the classroom. It sounds basic but that is probably because it should be, and I truly believe that this, in correlation with our drive to reduce teacher workload, will have a positive impact on student achievement and progress. This month, the coaching team will be looking in more detail at how planning lesson objectives and outcomes can really shape our teaching.

In ‘Teach like a Champion’, Begin with the End teaches us an effective way to plan lessons focusing on the lesson objective being the focal point at the start of planning. This strategy helps to move us away from planning a lesson to lesson, or simply that last minute planning the night before based on what to do rather than what do the students need to master in this sequence of learning. In this manner, the teacher knows that students master lessons as a unit and not as an individual days work. It also encourages students to look back on missed or misunderstood objectives so that they do not fall behind for future objectives since everything builds on itself.

Begin with the End is an excellent strategy because of how much it involves the Cognitive learning theory which focuses on the way that students learn and store new information. This strategy focuses most effectively on planning with the intent to teach students to master an objective. Through unit planning, the teacher focuses on repetition in the lesson, based on building upon knowledge acquired in previous lessons. This influence of repetition forces the students working memory to store information multiple times knowing that students brains are selective in what they transfer to long-term memory. By Begin with the End, teachers are ensuring that they plan for students to be given multiple chances to retain more information through interleaving knowledge and skills so that these transfer from their working memory to their long-term memory.

We have come a long way since the days of the WALT and WILF at Crookhorn and I think given the importance of objectives in bringing focus, discipline and measurability to a lesson, it’s worthwhile to think about what makes an objective useful and effective. In Teach like a Champion, they build their objectives around the ‘4 Ms’. The strategy is designed to help with planning that ensures academic achievement; it uses four simple criteria to determine if a lesson will be effective at reaching the required goals. The 4 Ms are: Manageable, Measurable, Made First, and Most Important. Each aspect is simple, which makes this an easy strategy to implement, yet extremely effective in classroom planning. By combining the four aspects, it ensures that a lesson is effective from start to finish.

Manageable

As with any lesson, it is important to decide before beginning a lesson if it is manageable for the class and for the time allotted. Too often, we see teachers set learning objectives that might be set over a couple of lessons or even over a topic, but we would have a much greater chance of success if we build a series of day to day objectives that are achievable and realistic which supports the process of conceptualising the steps necessary to achieve mastery. I believe this is vital for many Crookhorn learners, as they build up their confidence and belief as they work through the smaller, more manageable objectives. 

Measurable

This strategy suggests that teachers create objectives in such a way that the outcomes can be measured at the end of the day. This lets the teacher measure how well he or she achieved the objective, based on how well the students grasped the material. This also lets the teacher know if the class is ready to move on or needs to spend more time on the material. There are many ways our coaches are encouraging how we as teachers check for understanding and one of the suggestions given is to use an exit ticket, or a short CFU at the end of class to gauge the understanding of the material taught during class. Alternatively, it can be focussed around the students response to a key question that is then live marked during the independent part of the lesson. As we know with our current exam structure, one of the most prominent aspects of education has become the students’ abilities to remember information given to them and recall the information on a test. If a student does not remember the information immediately after it is presented, the chances are very high that the information will not be accessible during the following assessments either. By making sure each objective is measurable, it allows the teacher to see how well the students can apply the information learned, in order to use it as a basis for further planning and learning.

Made First

This aspect addresses a common mistake amongst teachers – choosing an objective off a pre-planned activity. “Made first” suggests that teachers choose the objective before anything else. By doing this, it allows for teachers to base the activities around the material that needs to be learned, which is the most effective way to design a lesson. 

Most Important

This aspect is short and straight-forward. Each objective should be designed to help students on their path to success. Only the most important information needs to be presented, in order to leave room for other information that is considered most important as well.

I hope this blog helps you consider how to use lesson objectives when planning out your future MTP’s, and please talk to your progress partner about how to do this in the future. As usual, any comments gratefully received.