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Teaching and Learning Blog

By James Collins, Deputy Headteacher

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  • April 2018 Blog

    Published 21/03/18, by James Collins

    When teaching and learning are “visible” – that is, when it is clear what teachers are teaching and what students are learning, student achievement increases. This is the key point in an article I read recently from the excellent John Hattie. John Hattie’s idea is something that as leaders we have become very aware of over the last few years and something that was very evident when I heard him speak at the ASCL conference in March. As you know we have started to embed in various areas of the curriculum, what we believe are really essential practices all aimed at making learning explicitly ‘visible’ to teachers and students. For example the use of live marking; creating a culture of error; medium-term planning; the focus of question level analysis after an assessment and the necessity of re-teaching areas after checking a student’s understanding are all techniques based on high-level research and they are undoubtedly the key as we work towards the ‘Excellence as Standard’ in our teaching and learning.

    John Hattie’s work on the factors that make the biggest impact on student achievement is an interesting read. One of the high impact factors is the feedback students receive in the classroom (Read an article by Hattie on feedback here). In the article, he describes that the more specific the feedback, whether it is from the teacher, from fellow students or even feedback that they are giving themselves, the more impact it has on the student’s development academically. Although feedback is among the most powerful of influences on learning, it can also be amongst the most variable. Hattie goes on to describe 6 key things;

    1.      Giving is not receiving: Teachers may claim they give much feedback, but the more appropriate measure is the nature of feedback received (and this is often quite little).

    2.      The culture of the student can influence the feedback effects: Feedback is not only differentially given but also differentially received.

    3.      Disconfirmation is more powerful than confirmation: When feedback is provided that disconfirms then there can be greater change, provided it is accepted.

    4.      Errors need to be welcomed: The exposure to errors in a safe environment can lead to higher performance

    5.      The power of peers: Interventions that aim to foster correct peer feedback is needed.

    6.      Feedback from the assessment: Assessment (…) could and should also provide feedback to teachers about their methods.

    Hattie describes the art of effective teaching is to provide the right form of feedback at, or just above, the level at which the student is working. Feedback should lead the student to move from the task towards the processes or understandings necessary to learn the task.  From there the aim is to take the student to extend beyond the task to more challenging goals. I think this can be summed up by asking the following questions to your students to consider when you give feedback;

    “What do I know and what can I do” (Level 1)

     “What do I not know and what can’t I do and what can I do about this” (Level 2)

    “What can I teach others (and myself) about what I know and can do” (Level 3)

    The article describes the benefit of regular, smaller chunks of feedback where students then change/amend their work. When compared to strategies such as longer school days, smaller class sizes and more money spent per student, research shows that rapid formative assessment is considered to be the most cost-effective. We must all consider this in our approach to live feedback, which my fellow coaches and I are trying to develop in teachers daily practice. Get that green pen in your hand, and give short sharp pieces of feedback to students and get them to redraft, improve or consider the feedback on the next piece of work and how they will change their practice as a result of it and we will see more progress!

    To finish, I just want to highlight some excellent practice I have seen recently in maths and how this is having an impact, not only on student progress but also on teacher workload- two key issues for all of our teachers. Jo Poulter has a very clear and easy way of giving her students feedback, she has found this has reduced the time she is spending marking, the students find it useful for them and they have improved their knowledge and skills because of it, so a winner all around. The theory is very simple, the students do a task or an assessment, which Jo marks, and gives a score to. She then completes a feedback sheet, which gives the students guidance on how to answer the questions they got wrong, and the students go back and attempt the questions again on the original paper, in red. She then gives them some similar questions to show that the students have learnt, which can be peer marked or by Jo when she is walking around during response time. If you don’t believe me in that this saves time, please go and speak to her and look at her books, which are excellent. Below are some pictures to give you an example.                               

      First mark   Feedback/hints  Reteach-extension/Progress check

    As usual, please discuss these ideas with your coach and any feedback is gratefully received. The research shows that this makes a huge difference to the students we teach so definitely worth a go!

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  • March 2018 Blog

    Published 14/02/18, by James Collins

    The core focus for all teachers at Crookhorn is to plan carefully and thoughtfully, to teach imaginatively and with passion, and to feedback to students in a low effort, high impact way to ensure strong progress. We are passionate about making sure everyone can concentrate on these pillars of teaching and learning, and hopefully, this is now evident through the way the teaching week is structured, the daily dialogue we engage in and the focus of our training over the last 18 months. 

    In this blog, I want to concentrate on planning. In our Progress partner meetings and our CPT, it is important we consider some key points when it comes to future planning. I want you to really consider these points below and reflect on where you are with your planning and ultimately enable you to have a greater impact on your students learning:  

    1. Be clear and precise about the knowledge and skills you want the students to learn, not what you want them to do. It is important to shift the focus away from what activities can I get the students to do, to what we are learning and why. This is why the learning outcomes and reference to them in the lesson as a progress check are key.  Nicky Smith is a master at this- so if you are worried about not understanding how to do this learning outcomes check effectively and you get a chance, pop in and go and see it in action. 
    2. Apply the ‘why’ test to all learning activities, including homework, so your planning is designed to facilitate learning and not to keep students busy. The students also need to understand the relevance of the learning, otherwise, it is very hard to get the 'buy-in' from them. 
    3. Integrate imaginative teaching strategies, such as storytelling, into your lessons to keep your students engaged, but think carefully about when you use them to ensure they have an impact. I watched a fantastic lesson from Samuel McGinley this week, which included a quiz for them to check for understanding that was fun and got the Year 11s to really consider what they had and hadn't learnt. 
    4. Embed ‘stick-ability’ into your lesson planning. What are the key aspects that you want to stick in the minds of the students at the end? Make sure you are clear in your plans what the key questions you have planned to allow for you to know the students have learnt. This for many teachers has been the turning point in their planning, and once you have got those key questions you can then design the lesson around them. 
    5. Plan to keep students in the ‘learning zone’ to ensure they feel sufficiently challenged but not stressed or anxious. In some of the books I have recently seen, I have seen so many worksheets that I don’t think stretch some of our high attaining students. If they are not asking questions in the lessons and not struggling slightly, you know it’s too easy and they should be challenged further.  

    Expert teaching requires challenge so that students have high expectations of what they can achieve. Keeping students in the learning zone means walking the fine line between students becoming apathetic due to boredom and students giving up because of stress or a feeling that they are incapable. This learning zone is ‘High challenge, low stress, thinking required, effective learning’. Think about your upcoming assessments, is the challenge, pitch and structure going to challenge all students?

     

    1. In lessons, plan to get them off to a flying start, so students learn purposefully from the beginning. ‘Do now’ tasks should be an easy way to get the students engaged and learning from minute 1.  
    2. Use seating plans based on your knowledge of the students and don’t be afraid to plan a change, such as home and away seating plans based on different activities. Tim Bezant is the master of this and speak to him if you think this is something you want to add to your planning.  
    3. Plan for when you are going to feedback and then when students are going to respond and show progress. Add this onto your MTP and annotate these plans with the outcomes of this feedback. We have recently seen some brilliant examples of these MTP's in English, with MTP's that were really detailed and considered. Tina and Martha showed SB and I the class books, to show how their planning was influencing the student body of work. It was amazing to see where the planning of the feedback then developed into students reflecting on their work, and then how they improved their future writing. In science, we are now seeing teachers looking at 3 books at the end of each lesson to really understand how much learning has happened and what needs to be planned into the very next lesson. In PE, Chris Watson has looked into how Carl is marking in English and is now really considering how he gives live feedback to the students so they can make progress, which he feels has improved him as a teacher. 

    I hope this helps when you consider your future planning, and I apologise in advance for probably embarrassing the teachers who I have mentioned in this blog! As SLT, we are committed to making sure our teachers can concentrate on giving good feedback, planning good lessons and then delivering high-quality lessons to our students and I am so pleased that at Crookhorn, the focus is now on how we improve the day to day quality of education our students get.  As usual, any comments gratefully received and have a lovely Easter break. 

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  • February 2018 Blog

    Published 17/01/18, by James Collins

    For the February blog, I wanted to concentrate on one of the biggest areas and challenges of College life which is the quality and frequency of our feedback and marking. Over the last couple of months, the SLT has been looking at many of the student books and considering how we evaluate the feedback and marking we provide at Crookhorn. If I am being honest, it is still very varied and inconsistent across the curriculum, and this is an area we do need to make sure is a strength for our students.

    It reminded me of the research that the Sutton Trust carried out many years ago now that highlights why feedback is so important. If delivered well, "effective feedback" can boost learning by an extra nine months in an academic year. By effective feedback it means shifting fundamentally how teachers approach their work in the classroom - understanding where their students are in relation to learning goals, adapting their teaching in response, and planning how to plug the learning gaps. This is especially important to our disadvantaged students, which has to remain one of the key foci at Crookhorn. 

    Over the years, teachers have spent surprisingly little time discussing what happens behind their own classroom door. Hopefully, the development of CPT on a Tuesday is helping to reduce this. It is vital we spend time when we met together looking at the feedback given across our subject, what works well and what can be improved. Too often feedback from teachers is unfocused - simply urging students to do more of the same. I am still baffled and annoyed when I look in our Crookhorn books and the feedback from some of our staff is “add more detail” or “try harder”. This is not feedback!

    This is doubly frustrating as the teacher is often spending their valuable time marking the books and then writing these comments, all I would suggest being a complete waste of valuable time. It’s not what you do, it's the way that you do it that counts. John Hattie outlined in his book ‘Visible Learning for Teachers’ about the importance of high-quality feedback and shared the benefits of a rigorous approach to marking and feedback, including the fact that assessing students helps teachers to learn about their own impact. He states that feedback and marking have 3 purposes- Students act on feedback to make progress over time, they inform future planning and teaching, and students learn to value hard work and the quality of work they produce. He also argues that some of the key elements of marking that have the greatest impact on learning are:

    • Sharing the key marking points (the success criteria)- students more likely to be successful if they know where they are going and how to get there
    • Clear feedback, comments only or verbal feedback which they then respond to by correcting their work or redoing it using your comments
    • Students should know the objectives and how they are going to prove they have learnt it but why make them write it down- have them visible if needed (on a whiteboard or as a banner on PPT) but do not get them to copy it down, it is not necessary!

    I have been reading ‘Mark, Plan, Teach’ which is a book that looks at maximizing the impact of teaching and, in doing so, save time, reduce workload and teachers taking control of their classroom. The intention of the book is to encourage teachers to view their teaching process as a continuous cycle:

     

     

    As a starting point, both summative and formative marking should be diagnostic, we should allow us to make it clear to a student how to improve their piece of work and learning, rather than simply giving them a grade. When they respond to this specific feedback, it is then we will see the progress. There are many strategies that are being used by our teachers to help them with giving effective feedback and many of the ones are detailed in this link so please take a look and discuss with your coach and HOS. https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2016/02/05/markingsketchnote/

    We know many of our teachers are working incredibly long hours and finding any free time to mark outside of the classroom during our working week is tough and sometimes near impossible job. I believe that hard work should be in the classroom and not away from it. It is important that before you set an assessment and then sit down to mark it, you should first consider where you are in the curriculum and the purpose of setting and marking this specific piece of work. Think about the starting point, progress and context of each student. This ‘overview’ will inform how you spend time marking to improve teaching, learning and assessment. I know many of you will point out to me about the fact that there is a frequency marking cycle that we must stick to, but as an SLT, if we can see that actually over a MTP, you have carefully considered where you are going to mark for impact and it might not be in week 3, 6 and 9 but actually 5, 6 and 9 which suits the students far better we will not hold that against you!

    Finally, I have recently read an article titled ‘Is Your Feedback Carefully Used, or Barely Perused?’ which is very thought-provoking. It is all about getting students to engage with your feedback and looking making sure that students don’t just receive the feedback but actually leads to them developing skills. It highlights that if we are not seeing much progress, the solution is not to give more and more feedback, but to help students to become better users of feedback. Students should be able to appraise their own work, set targets for themselves to develop their work and be motivated to do this intrinsically. If we consider what happens to us when we receive critical feedback as teachers, we often as adults get defensive and put barriers up, and this is nearly always the way with children so we need to consider how we structure feedback so our children are positive about making changes. Here is a copy of the link so you can have a read http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/9/27-1

    As an SLT, we will be doing learning walks every week to look at the quality of feedback our students are receiving and we will expect all teachers to firstly be up to date with their frequency of feedback and secondly by providing a high quality of feedback to aid progress. If you want any guidance or support with making sure you are giving our students the best possible feedback, then please ask.

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  • January 2018 Blog

    Published 13/12/17, by James Collins

    Improving teaching and learning is at the heart of every good school and I hope it is clear to all teachers here at Crookhorn that this is the number one priority which will allow us to achieve the ‘Excellence as Standard’ vision. I can’t speak for you, but I think my teaching has improved through the CPD time, the collaborative planning I do with colleagues on Tuesday and the reading I have done which has made me really think about how I deliver my lessons. I want to share with you each month some of the ideas, articles and strategies I have seen and I promise I will always try to keep it brief as possible as we all have busy lives, please don’t feel you have to read on if it’s not for you, I will never know and therefore I can’t take offence! 

    Recently Dave Lemon asked us to read an article at Academic Board about teaching to the top, an article Tom Sherrington wrote about teaching to stretch all students in the classroom https://teacherhead.com/2017/05/28/teaching-to-the-top-attitudes-and-strategies-for-delivering-real-challenge

     A big part of that article was about Synoptic questions. Synoptic questions encourage students to combine elements of their learning from different parts of a programme and to show their accumulated knowledge and understanding of a topic or subject area. A synoptic question normally enables students to show their ability to integrate and apply their skills, knowledge and understanding with breadth and depth in the subject. It can help to test a student's capability of applying the knowledge and understanding gained in one part of a programme to increase their understanding in other parts of the programme, or across the programme as a whole. The coaches in the College have also read about a technique called ‘stretch it’ from ‘Teach like a champion’ which also highlights the technique of asking students to apply the same skill in a new setting (p108 to p116) through questioning and we will be working on this with teachers in the classroom over the coming weeks. Here are some examples for you to consider to help you when planning your questions.

    English example:

    Rewrite the following sayings in your own words, explaining, as you do, exactly what you think they mean:

     Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them. (Franklin P Jones)  

    2. Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it (Stephen Leacock)

    3. The flush toilet is the basis of civilisation. (Alan Coult)

    4. Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain nor freed a human soul. (Mark Twain)

    5. Beware the fury of a patient man. (John Dryden)

    This is a synoptic activity because it combines the need to be able to analyse language with the capability of being able to reorganise it to show a clear understanding of meaning, thereby being able to interpret the author's original intentions.

    As part of your Medium term planning, I want you to consider where you can use synoptic questions to promote student progress in the classroom. Try working with your Progress partner to get some examples you can use and then give them a go and then sit down and discuss how they went (or ask your coach to observe you giving this technique a try).

     

    Geography example:

    Consider how climate change has influenced extreme river flooding and the impact this has had on affected communities.

     This one is good because it challenges the idea that flooding is the result of random weather and instead asks them to make links with the effects of climate change, namely that increased global temperatures result in increased evaporation leading to enhanced monsoons in the Asian subcontinent and the amplification of Atlantic hurricanes. They can also consider the positives e.g. the flooding of the Ganges and Nile provides fertile silt to farmland that improves production. It also expects consideration of the impacts e.g. the need to build more sturdy homes and the need for flood defences.

    I hope you have found this useful and thought provoking in terms of the questions you can pose in your classrooms. This is a key strand of looking to stretch our students in the classroom and hopefully, you will see this as you practice the technique. As part of your Medium term planning, I want you to consider where you can use synoptic questions to promote student progress in the classroom. Try working with your Progress Partner to get some examples you can use and then give them a go and then sit down and discuss how they went (or ask your coach to watch you giving this technique a try).

     Good luck and feel free to come and see me or drop me an email to let me know how it is going.

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