Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 3: Scaffold
So, you've explained the new concepts and ideas students will need to know, deconstructed examples so that they know how to use these concepts in practice and you've modelled the process of how an expert would go about creating an effective example of whatever product students need to create. Surely they're now ready to be released, joyfully, on to the foothills of independent learning? No, not quite yet they're not. [...]
Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 2: Model
Over the past few years I've thought a lot about how and what we should teach. My journey has been long and painful. I used to evangelically promote the teaching of transferable '21st century skills' like creativity and problem solving. Now I reckon that actually these skills might be subject specific, and that solving a maths problem might be very different to solving a problem in English. And perhaps being creative [...]
Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 1: Explain
"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." EB White There are some definite pit falls to avoid in explaining things to kids. The biggest criticism of teachers talking is that it's boring. And, generally speaking, boring kids is not a good way to get them to learn stuff. But to suggest that teachers should therefore avoid [...]
Great teaching happens in cycles – the teaching sequence for developing independence
Last year I wrote a post called The Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson, which has become by far my most viewed post with almost 10,000 page views. Clearly teachers are hungry for this kind of thing. But it’s become increasingly obvious to me over the past few months that many of my notions about what might constitute an outstanding lesson have been turned on their head. It’s not so much that I [...]
Wellington Education Festival
Thank you so much to all those who squeezed in to my Deliberately Difficult session at Wellington today. Photo by @headguruteacher I realise that lots of people were unable to see the screen due to the thronging hordes (really!) blocking their view, so here, as promised, are the slides I used : Ed fest desirable difficulties from David Didau As ever, I met some lovely people; some for [...]
Independence vs independent learning
Last weekend #SLTchat was on fostering students' independence. As you'd expect, there were lots of great suggestions shared, as well as some not so great ideas. One comment I tweeted in response to the idea that to promote independence we should get students learning independently got quite a lot of feedback: This seemed to really divide opinion; some people got upset with me, and some others agreed enthusiastically. Having read [...]
How knowledge is being detached from skills in English
I don't normally do this. In fact, I haven't put up a post by anyone else since last August. But in this case Joe Kirby has expressed my own thoughts so articulately that there seemed little point trying to repeat the same thing myself. Not only that, Joe is somewhat of a phenomenon. His grasp of the nuances of education theory belies the fact that he is only just completing his NQT year. When I compare [...]
Testing & assessment – have we been doing the right things for the wrong reasons?
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we [...]
So, what does 'gifted' mean anyway?
As you may be aware, non-selective secondary schools are failing the 'most able'. How do we know? Because a brand new Ofsted report tells us so. The report's key findings include such revelations as the fact that "expectations of what the most able students should achieve are too low" and that not enough has been done "to create a culture of scholastic excellence" which leads, unsurprisingly, to, "Many students become [...]
Deliberately difficult – why it's better to make learning harder
The most fundamental goals of education are long-term goals. As teachers and educators, we want targeted knowledge and skills to be acquired in a way that makes them durable and flexible. More specifically, we want a student’s educational experience to produce a mental representation of the knowledge or skill in question that fosters long-term access to that knowledge and the ability to generalize—that is, to draw on that knowledge in [...]
Planning Lessons – lessons I’ve learned from lessons I've taught
This is a summary and a drawing together of several earlier posts. I consider it a refinement of my thinking and something which is painstakingly (and grandiosely) groping its way towards a total philosophy of planning. It does also attempt to offer something new but is this enough to deserve a new post? You decide. "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Smug teachers, everywhere Planning: still a good thing [...]
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