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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 do [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

One of the biggest barriers to the successful implementation of an English curriculum is that all too often students are assessed on their ability to do things they haven't actually been taught. This may sound bizarre, but it is, I think, an inevitable product of the belief that English is a 'skills-based subject'. Let's say you teach students a unit on 'Greek myth,' 'a background to Shakespeare,' or Malorie Blackman's YA novel Noughts and Crosses. How will you assess students' progress? Typically, some theme or aspect covered in the unit is brought to the fore and then students are asked to [...]

The idea that education acts as a Matthew Effect that disproportionately benefits those who start with most is an uncomfortable but well-understood phenomenon. Everything we do in schools either widens the advantage gap between the most privileged and least privileged students, or narrows it. This is, I think, a real dichotomy: anything that, on balance, appears net neutral is in fact acting to keep the gap a yawning chasm of inequity. This allows us to look at any potential intervention or policy and ask whether it's likely to widen or narrow the gap. Take, for instance, Renaissance Learning's ubiquitous quizzing software, [...]