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How should we view the performance of the most disadvantaged students?

In spite of our best efforts, the academic performance of our most and least advantaged students stubbornly refuses to close. In fact, as a recent report from the Education Policy Institute shows, the gap seems to be getting wider. Nationally, disadvantaged students at the end of primary school were 10.3 months behind their peers in 2023, a whole month increase since 2019. ... Nationally, the disadvantage gap widens as pupils progress through schooling, reaching 19.2 months at the end of secondary school in 2023, an increase of over a month since 2019. Some of these increases are no doubt connected [...]

2024-07-18T15:38:25+01:00July 18th, 2024|leadership|

The purpose of a system is what it does

Following a recommendation from Sam Freedman, I've recently devoured Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine. It's an attempt to analyse 'what's gone wrong' in what we might call The West over the past decade or so through the lens of cybernetics. I know, right? If your first thought is to assume that this must have something to do with tech (or Dr Who) you can be forgiven as the term has been thoroughly hijacked since it was first coined by the American mathematician, Norbert Wiener in 1948. The word is derived from the Latin (via Greek) kybernetes, meaning 'steersman.' The French, [...]

2024-06-20T07:23:10+01:00June 20th, 2024|leadership|

Why bother with ‘turn & talk’?

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 [...]

2024-06-07T17:19:07+01:00June 7th, 2024|Featured|

Messy markbooks: monitoring participation in (and across) lessons

Since taking the plunge with mini-whiteboards (see this post) over the past few years my ability to know whether students are paying attention, thinking and practising has dramatically increased. Because I'm usually teaching groups of children I've not met before, I always draw out a seating plan and make sure I have everyone's names recorded. With access to MWBs, it made sense to jot this information onto a whiteboard rather than a piece of paper. I'd then find myself ticking students off as I asked them questions or got them to participate in some other way to ensure I had [...]

2024-01-28T17:21:51+00:00January 20th, 2024|Featured|

Attention, meaning & consolidation: matching technique to purpose

It's become increasingly clear to me that training teachers on how to use pedagogical techniques is of limited use. Over the past year or so I've lost count of the times I've watched a teacher act on feedback, improve how how they are, say, cold calling, or using a visualiser or mini-whiteboard, and yet still somehow the lesson is a series of missed opportunities with students failing to learn what was intended. A few years ago I read (or at lest, skimmed) Mary Kennedy's 2015 paper, Parsing the Practice of Teaching and was struck, like so many others, by her [...]

2024-06-08T11:40:04+01:00January 12th, 2024|English, reflection, training|

Earned autonomy and shared responsibility

Having just gotten around to reading Matthew Evans' blog, The Earned Autonomy Trap, I feel moved to break my blogging silence of the past few months. In my book, Intelligent Accountability, I present earned autonomy as one of the principles required to balance trust and accountability and help create the conditions for teachers to thrive. In it, I argue the following: What if, no matter how hard a teacher works, no matter how successful their efforts are, they are still expected to follow the same constraints designed to support the least effective teachers? These problems are avoided if teachers are [...]

2024-01-06T09:24:14+00:00January 5th, 2024|Featured, leadership|

In defence of accountability

This weekend saw Joe Kirby publish a thoughtful blog in which he calls for an end to Quality Assurance. I agree with Joe's analysis of the causes of poor accountability - or QA - but not his suggested solutions. In his blog, Joe says that "QA warps time, trust, thinking, teaching, leadership and learning." There's no doubt that this can  sometimes be true, but it runs the risk of becoming a straw man argument in which poor QA is attacked in order to justify getting rid of all QA. In order to see if Joe's arguments are true, we ought [...]

2023-04-06T09:18:45+01:00March 19th, 2023|leadership|

OAT English curriculum project

Since January 2020 I've been working for Omiston Academies Trust as their Senior Lead for English. Over that time I and the amazing team of lead practitioners I lead have created what we think is a fantastic English curriculum. Not only have we been working on a book which will explain the entire process from intent, to implementation to impact, we've just launched a website - OAT English - to host all of the resources and training materials we've created. All the materials are covered under a Creative Commons license so that - as long as you don't try to [...]

2023-02-26T15:49:39+00:00February 26th, 2023|English|

When retrieval practice goes wrong (and how to get it right)

Whenever a practice becomes mandated there seems to be a tendency for it to lethally mutate. When I first started writing about retrieval practice (or the testing effect as we used to call it) many people were surprised by the finding that attempting to dredge something up from memory was a more effective way to learn it than simply restudying it. Today, this has become something new teachers are routinely told as part of their initial training and has been accepted as incontestable. The result is that teachers are told that lessons must contain retrieval practice and schools often specify [...]

2023-02-27T23:44:45+00:00January 28th, 2023|English|

Should we seek to balance teacher-led and student-led lesson activities?

For as long as I've been writing about education, many commentators have argued that teaching should seek to balance teacher-led and student-led activities. Although this is often presented as self-evidently obvious, it rather begs the question. What's so great about balance? Should we seek balance for its own sake, because it's intrinsically valuable, or should we consider what we want to balance? Despite balance sounding - well - balanced, no one would argue that we should seek to achieve a balance between effective and ineffective activities so to argue that teaching should include both teacher-led and student-led activities we really [...]

2023-11-25T11:17:48+00:00October 29th, 2022|Featured|

Gapless instruction vs ‘teaching to the top’

Over the years I’ve recommended that teachers ‘teach to the top’ on too many occasions to count. For the most part, I’ve caveated this by included the need to ‘scaffold down,’ but, honestly, I’ve come to believe that the phrase ‘teaching to the top’ has the capacity to do more harm than good. I spoke at a conference recently where I asked participants to discuss what they understood by the term. After a brief chat, I asked them to respond on their mini whiteboards to the following question: What is the best definition of the term ‘teaching to the top’? A) [...]

2022-10-16T07:03:31+01:00October 15th, 2022|Featured|

Using mini whiteboards in English

According to TeacherTapp, 72% primary and 45% secondary teachers use mini whiteboards (MWBs.) There are big variations between different subjects in secondaries with 69% of MFL and 57% science teachers claiming to use them but just 28% of English teachers. Why might this be? Are MFL and science lessons just better suited to using MWBs? Are English lesson much more concerned with the kind of extended writing that best lends itself to exercise books? Judging from the poll responses above, primary teachers appear to be more concerned with checking students' understanding during lessons. Charitably, we might claim that in secondaries [...]

2023-03-31T16:34:52+01:00October 9th, 2022|English|
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