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.

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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 of missed opportunities with students failing to learn what was intended.

Mary Kennedy’s 2015 paper, Parsing the Practice of Teaching suggests that education has to solve five ‘persistent problems’:

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  1. Portraying the curriculum (finding ways to bring subject matter to life)
  2. Enlisting student participation (making sure that students are engaged in meaningful activities)
  3. Exposing student thinking (finding out what students are thinking)
  4. Containing student behaviour (making sure that lessons are safe and free from disruption)
  5. Accommodating personal needs (doing all this in a way which accommodates teachers’ preferences and personalities)

This is a really useful way to think about what teachers need to know and how they should go about leveraging that knowledge in the classroom. Having reflected on these problems for a while now, I’d like to suggest representing the idea slightly differently as a series of questions teachers need to answer every lesson:

  1. How do all know that all students are paying attention?
  2. How do I know that all students have made sense of what has been taught?
  3. How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn?

There’s another question which is as – if not more important – as the preceding three but needs to be thought about differently:

  1. How can I do all this in a way which is inclusive and results in all students experiencing success?*

In most of the lessons I observe, teachers don’t know whether all students are doing these things. In the best cases, they may know whether a small sample of students are paying attention, understanding content and getting better at the things we want them to get get better at, but will have no idea what’s going on for the majority of students. In the worst cases, teachers assume that all students are attending, understanding and mastering content based on the performance of those students most keen to participate in the lesson and with the most prior knowledge of the topic being taught.

Although it’s almost certainly impossible to have perfect knowledge of what’s going on in the minds of a roomful of children, the knowledge we have can be better or worse. Just knowing that we don’t know something can be very useful. I intend to discuss each of these questions separately and in detail, but for now, here are some suggestions of actions teachers could take to give them better knowledge of what all students are doing in lessons:

Attention

  • Ask lots of closed questions
  • Use a mini whiteboard routine to regularly check that all students know what has been said
  • Circulate the class room to check what students are writing on MWBs
  • Cold call a good sample of students (at least 3-4 each time) to check they know what has been taught
  • Ask students to repeat what their peers say
  • Make a note on a ‘messy markbook’ of which students have answered questions and whether or not they were able to answer
  • Use a visualiser to direct students’ attention to specific points (I do)

Understanding

  • Ask open questions
  • Cold call students to rephrase ideas in their own words, using the messy markbook to record what is said
  • Ask students to use MWBs to shape their thoughts before sharing
  • Ask students to ‘turn and talk’ to exchange ideas
  • Circulate the class room to check what students are writing on MWBs and intervene where necessary
  • Ask students to explain their talk partners’ ideas
  • Use a visualiser to co-construct ideas (we do)

Consolidation

  • Ask questions that required extended responses in particular formats
  • Ask students to improve answers on their MWBs using new vocabulary and academic language rehearsed during the lesson
  • Ask students to reframe their own, and other’s ideas using academic language
  • Give students multiple opportunities to practise using new vocabulary and expressing ideas in academic language
  • Ask students to work with greater independence
  • Use a visualiser to share students’ extended responses (you do)

You may well have questions about some of these points but hopefully this is enough of flavour to start you thinking about how to support teachers to use pedagogical techniques thoughtfully and with a clear purpose.

* I’ll focus on this fourth question in a separate post.