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How do I know all students are paying attention?

2025-03-22T15:43:38+00:00March 22nd, 2025|Featured|

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 [...]

How can we teach so that all students experience success?

2025-04-29T16:46:08+01:00March 17th, 2025|Featured|

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 [...]

Attention, meaning and mastery: The questions every teacher needs to answer every lesson

2025-03-13T16:10:37+00:00March 13th, 2025|Featured|

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 [...]

Using hinge point questions in English

2024-11-03T18:48:44+00:00November 3rd, 2024|assessment|

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 information about what actions they should take next. A well-designed hinge question should reveal potential misconceptions which can then be addressed. Students need to be able to answer the hinge question [...]

The purpose of a system is what it does

2024-06-20T07:23:10+01:00June 20th, 2024|leadership|

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 has been thoroughly hijacked since it was first coined by the American mathematician, Norbert Wiener in 1948. The word is derived from the Latin (via Greek) kybernetes, meaning 'steersman.' The French, [...]

Attention, meaning & consolidation: matching technique to purpose

2024-06-08T11:40:04+01:00January 12th, 2024|English, reflection, training|

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 what was intended. A few years ago I read (or at lest, skimmed) Mary Kennedy's 2015 paper, Parsing the Practice of Teaching and was struck, like so many others, by her [...]

When retrieval practice goes wrong (and how to get it right)

2023-02-27T23:44:45+00:00January 28th, 2023|English|

Whenever a practice becomes mandated there seems to be a tendency for it to lethally mutate. When I first started writing about retrieval practice (or the testing effect as we used to call it) many people were surprised by the finding that attempting to dredge something up from memory was a more effective way to learn it than simply restudying it. Today, this has become something new teachers are routinely told as part of their initial training and has been accepted as incontestable. The result is that teachers are told that lessons must contain retrieval practice and schools often specify [...]

Should we seek to balance teacher-led and student-led lesson activities?

2023-11-25T11:17:48+00:00October 29th, 2022|Featured|

For as long as I've been writing about education, many commentators have argued that teaching should seek to balance teacher-led and student-led activities. Although this is often presented as self-evidently obvious, it rather begs the question. What's so great about balance? Should we seek balance for its own sake, because it's intrinsically valuable, or should we consider what we want to balance? Despite balance sounding - well - balanced, no one would argue that we should seek to achieve a balance between effective and ineffective activities so to argue that teaching should include both teacher-led and student-led activities we really [...]

Gapless instruction vs ‘teaching to the top’

2022-10-16T07:03:31+01:00October 15th, 2022|Featured|

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) [...]

Using mini whiteboards in English

2023-03-31T16:34:52+01:00October 9th, 2022|English|

According to TeacherTapp, 72% primary and 45% secondary teachers use mini whiteboards (MWBs.) There are big variations between different subjects in secondaries with 69% of MFL and 57% science teachers claiming to use them but just 28% of English teachers. Why might this be? Are MFL and science lessons just better suited to using MWBs? Are English lesson much more concerned with the kind of extended writing that best lends itself to exercise books? Judging from the poll responses above, primary teachers appear to be more concerned with checking students' understanding during lessons. Charitably, we might claim that in secondaries [...]

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