Attention, meaning and mastery: The questions every teacher needs to answer every lesson
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 [...]
It’s always better to know
Over the last few years I've made a habit of teaching demonstration lessons in the schools I work with in order to make it clearer how to teach effectively. One of the things that makes this useful is that I'm always teaching students I don't know and so, instead of watching a slick performance with students who have been thoroughly trained in the routines of a functional classroom, teachers [...]
Using hinge point questions in English
This post is an extract from Bringing the English Curriculum to Life. In order to teach responsively, teachers need to be able to quickly identify misconceptions and check students’ understanding. A hinge question is a diagnostic tool deployed at a point in a lesson – the hinge – where teachers need to know whether students are ready to move on require further instruction. Students’ responses should provide teachers with [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 - [...]
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