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This post was published first on Substack. Please consider subscribing if you haven't already. In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I wrote that all teachers need to answer four questions every lesson: How do all know all students are paying attention? How do I know all students have made sense of what has been taught? How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn? How can I do all this in a way which is inclusive and results in all students experiencing success? This post explores the second question: how can we be sure our students have [...]

This post is also on Substack. As a reminder, I'm planning to stop posting here in the short to medium term so I'd be really grateful if you could subscribe over there. Thanks, David In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I wrote that all teachers need to answer four questions every lesson: How do all know that all students are paying attention? How do I know that all students have made sense of what has been taught? How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn? How can I do all this in a way which is inclusive [...]

A reminder that I'm shifting my output over to Substack, so it would be wonderful if you could subscribe over there. I've been reworking some older posts on this blog and publishing them there so you may recognise a few old favourites.  In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I wrote that all teachers need to answer four questions every lesson: How do all know that all students are paying attention? How do I know that all students have made sense of what has been taught? How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn? How can I [...]

After a loooong hiatus from blogging I've decided to give substack a try. You can subscribe here. For the next few blogs I'll also post here on the Learning Spy site but, depending on how things go, I'm intending to eventually port everything over. I hope you'll come with me. *** Training teachers how to use pedagogical techniques is, I've decided, of limited use. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched a teacher act on feedback to improve on how they are, say, cold calling, or using a visualiser or mini-whiteboard, and yet still somehow the lesson is a series [...]

Beyond the notion that it's nice for students to chat, or 'do oracy,' is there any real merit in getting them to talk to each other during lessons? Recently on Twitter, Barry Smith got in touch to go over all the things he sees that regularly go wrong with 'turn & talk': Kids don’t know a lot & simply aren’t able to articulate anything meaningful in the time given. Kids slow to start. Don’t have the words. Kids given very short time to express ideas. One child will dominate. Others don’t participate. Kids embarrassed Then there’s issue of kids teaching [...]