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AfL: cargo cult teaching?

2015-12-10T13:53:58+00:00August 31st, 2013|assessment, Featured, learning|

OK, so here's a quick summary of the story so far: A few days ago I suggested in a blog post that maybe AfL 'wasn't all that'. Lots of lovely people kindly got in touch to point out that I clearly hadn't got a clue what AfL actually was, and then Gordon Baillie wrote a really rather good response in defence of AfL on his blog. Right? Right. At this point I'm going to tediously catalogue what I know about AfL so no one's confused about what I might and might not be suggesting. Here's a collection of posts I've written on feedback [...]

Chasing our tails – is AfL all it's cracked up to be?

2013-08-29T21:17:40+01:00August 29th, 2013|assessment, learning, myths|

Is it blasphemous to doubt the efficacy of AfL? While purists might argue that it's 'just good teaching', we teach in a world where formative assessment has become dogma and where feedback is king. (Don't worry, I'm not about to start upsetting the feedback applecart although there are occasions when pupils can benefit from it being reduced.) But AfL as a 'thing'? I'm not just talking about some of the nonsense that gets spouted about lolly sticks and traffic lights, I'm questioning the entire edifice. Is assessment for learning really all it's cracked up to be, or is it just me? You [...]

Motivation: when the going gets tough, the tough get going

2014-02-06T17:47:22+00:00August 26th, 2013|learning, planning|

If ever you get embroiled in a discussion on Learning Styles you may well be confronted with the chestnut of motivation. Learning styles, it seems to me, are all about motivation and management, and nothing whatsoever to do with learning. There is of course a correlation between learning and motivation but often they get conflated. Much of what goes on in classrooms is predicated on the belief that if kids are sufficiently engaged in an activity, they will learn from it. But it doesn't take a genius to spot that we can really enjoy something without learning a whole lot from [...]

Why can’t we tell a good teacher through lesson observations?

2020-07-17T15:38:53+01:00August 23rd, 2013|leadership, learning, myths|

No teacher is so good - or so bad - that he or she cannot improve. Dylan Wiliam The English education system is obsessed with ascertaining the quality of teachers. And what with the great and the good telling us that teacher quality is the most important ingredient in pupils' success then maybe it's small wonder.  As Michael Barber says, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." And taken in the round, assessing teacher quality and then working to develop teachers is an entirely laudable aim. Bizarrely though, many schools seem incapable of seeing beyond [...]

The problem with fun

2016-10-02T13:38:59+01:00August 22nd, 2013|learning, planning|

Getting students engaged so that they can be taught something seems much less effective than getting them engaged by teaching them something that engages them. Dylan Wiliam Could fun be the enemy of learning? I've not always been the curmudgeonly killjoy I am today. Some years ago, I took part in a department meeting where we were asked to prioritise those qualities we most valued about teaching. We came up with all the tiresomely worthy answers you might expect, but, somewhat controversially, I insisted on including 'fun'. The case I made went something like this: I don't teach for the money, I [...]

What's the point of classroom displays?

2013-07-21T11:53:30+01:00July 21st, 2013|learning|

Having broken up for the summer and feeling warm and expansive, I foolishly asked Twitter what it would like me to write about next. Michael Oxenham came back, quick as a flash with "classroom display". Dutifully, I then asked Twitter what made a good classroom display. These are some of the responses: @tim7168 Also things that make the classroom 'theirs' (primary). Lots of photos, work etc. @benking01 Examples of best-practice from students and ensuring that the work displayed is more than just 'pretty' - Must be informative. @oldandrewuk Having nothing which can be used as a projectile or cannot be easily repaired. [Health & [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 4: Practise

2013-07-19T14:12:46+01:00July 4th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

What does practice make? Well, it turns out that my mum was wrong. Doug Lemov points out in Practice Perfect that practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. What we practise we get good at. And sometimes we get very good at doing things badly. Take writing for instance. When I scribble notes I always use capital letters correctly. This isn't a boast: I just do. It would never occur to me not to, I don't even think about it. When I read students' work they invariably omit capital letters for proper nouns. Now, I rarely meet a secondary student who [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 3: Scaffold

2013-07-19T14:15:02+01:00July 2nd, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

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. Everyone benefits from scaffolding to help move them from kind of knowing vaguely what to do to being confident. Confidence is key; if students lack it then they're really going to [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 2: Model

2014-04-21T21:48:10+01:00June 30th, 2013|English, Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

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 in science may possibly be fundamentally different to creativity in history. I used to be firmly convinced that everything students needed to know could be outsourced to Google. Why bother learning [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 1: Explain

2013-08-29T18:51:34+01:00June 26th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

"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 explaining their subjects to students is a bizarre leap. Surely it would be vastly more sensible to expend our efforts in improving teachers' ability to explain? This then is the aim [...]

Great teaching happens in cycles – the teaching sequence for developing independence

2016-09-25T13:35:23+01:00June 24th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

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 was wrong, more that my understanding was incomplete. If we accept, as I’m sure we do, that as teachers we want to accomplish different things at different points in our schemes [...]

Testing & assessment – have we been doing the right things for the wrong reasons?

2013-06-16T18:01:29+01:00June 16th, 2013|assessment, Featured, learning, myths|

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 shall very likely need the book once more. William James, The principles of psychology (1890)   Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving. David Ogilvy Tests are rubbish, right? Like [...]

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