CST Habits. Issue 5

habits.

Poor Proxies for learning and what to replace them with

"Ensure that, during explanations, teachers regularly connect new learning to what pupils have already learnt"

How to speak so students will listen

"Every interaction is the possibility to build a positive relationship"

Kebabs, EDI and SEN

"Good teaching is good teaching, regardless of the background of the students"

T

Thahmina Begum

Simon Elliott

Louise Mace

CONTRIBUTORS

Thahmina Begum Executive Headteacher Community Schools Trust

Simon Elliott CEO Community Schools Trust

Charlotte Whelan Executive Regional Director Community Schools Trust

Eloise Hart Head of Social Sciences Forest Gate Community School

Louise Mace Assistant Headteacher Cumberland Community School

Rob Clark Assistant Headteacher Forest Gate Community School

Ben Walker DPR Lead University Technical College Norfolk

Salma Adam Teacher of the Deaf The Petchey Academy

Raeanne Meade Assistant Headteacher The Petchey Academy

Michael Ghany Head of English Waterside Academy

Ekhlas Rahman Headteacher Cumberland Community School

Omer Pazar Head of Physics Cumberland Community School

Naveed Hussain Assistant Headteacher Cumberland Community School

Poor proxies for learning and what to replace them with

ThahminaBegum,ExecutiveHeadteacherCST

At Community Schools Trust, we’ve worked really hard on establishing consistent routines across our schools. It means our students are in good habits of entering and exiting our classrooms quickly, being engaged in lessons and producing lots of work.

When visiting each other in lessons, generally, I know you will notice the following things:

1. Students are busy: lots of work is done (especially written work)

2. Students are engaged, interested, motivated

3. Students are getting attention: feedback, explanations

4. Classroom is ordered, calm, under control

5. Curriculum has been ‘covered’ (ie presented to students in some form)

6. (At least some) students have supplied correct answers

For those of you who have read Professor Coe’s ‘What Makes Great Teaching, you will recognise the above list as what he argued to be ‘poor proxies for learning’. Coe argues that these examples are easily observed – in fact, many of you may look for these things when you drop into a colleague’s lesson – but according to Coe, they are not really about learning.

Poor proxies for learning

They are all related to learning but they’re not learning. Sure, lots of writing might mean students are learning – but not if what they have written is not reflective of their ability.

I recall a particularly engaging science lesson when I was at school, but what I remember about it was the bunsen burner setting my classmate’s scarf alight. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean learning.

Live marking at CST means our students get a lot of attention: lots of feedback for example. But what if the feedback does not stretch them? What if our explanations are not clear or broken down? Learning would certainly be affected.

Our strong routines means our classrooms are indeed orderly, calm and under control. It is certainly an antecedent for learning. But calmness and order doesn’t mean our students are thinking hard and therefore not a good proxy for learning.

Time pressures mean we often fall into the trap of ‘content coverage’. We need to ‘get through the curriculum’ before the end of a term. They may even be able to answer questions correctly in lessons at the time of teaching. The problem of course is their ability to retrieve this knowledge later on. Just because we’ve taught it, doesn’t mean they’ve learnt it.

‘In some schools, there was an over-reliance on pupils catching up when the content was repeated later in the curriculum, rather than ensuring it was learned first time. Often this happened when teachers were expected to teach too much content in a short time. This was more common in secondary schools.’

(Finding the optimum: the science subject report, Ofsted science research review, Feb 2023)

Ofsted tells us our students should know more and remember more. Sweller et al. 2011 says ‘‘If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned’ and Daniel Willingham tells us we remember what we think about.

That’s all well and good but the problem is, learning is invisible. It is no wonder why we gravitate towards those observable but poor proxies for learning.

Better proxies for learning

Coe argues, to combat these poor proxies, we need to make our students think hard. To make this more tangible, we need to ask ourselves the question: ‘where in this lesson will students have to think hard?’

There are numerous ways to make students think hard but here are 3 high leverage ones (that we think we do well, but probably don’t do consistently well):

1 Check for understanding

• Decide on the ‘learning milestones’ in your lesson

• Plan in a checking for understanding (CFU) question to ascertain if they have reached this learning milestone

• Plan how you will CFU. It could be a whole class response system like the use of mini whiteboards, followed by Cold Call.

2 Cold Call properly

• Increase Ratio by asking a well worded question first, allowing thinking time before picking a student

• Picking a student first and then asking a question will make the rest of your class clock out. Ratio will plummet

• Standardise the format so your students expect the routine of question – pause – pick a student.

3 Pitch to the top

• Plan your lessons so that they are aimed at your highest ability learner and scaffold down

• Teach the content in small steps, point out the assessment threshold standards as you go and check for understanding after each step

• Make explicit links to prior learning as you explain.

In fact, this was one of the ‘pedagogy and assessment’ recommendations from the science research review from Ofsted that applies to all subjects:

‘Ensure that, during explanations, teachers regularly connect new learning to what pupils have already learned. This includes showing pupils how knowledge from different areas of the curriculum connects.’

This week then, when you are intellectually preparing for your lessons, plan in the above 3 strategies to make your students think hard.

Bait and Switch

SimonElliott,CEOCST

Why did you come into teaching?

A wag once said, there are two good things about being a teacher: July and August. Indeed, there are still more than a few who, despite what they say at interview, came into the profession for the holidays.

Meanwhile, eleven million people live in poverty in the UK out of a population of 67 million. Poverty is bad, especially for children, as the diagram illustrates.

How can we fix poverty in our schools? From the EEF:

“Evidence indicates that high quality teaching is the most important lever schools have to improve pupil attainment, including for disadvantaged pupils. Schools should focus on building teacher knowledge and pedagogical expertise, curriculum development, and the purposeful use of assessment.”

Every time you train to get better in the classroom, you’re helping to create a better life for children.

Every time we run a training session, we’re aiming to tackle poverty.

Every time you turn up to work, you’re helping address inequality.

So, come for the holidays, stay for a place in heaven.

Not a bad bait and switch is it?

‘Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation’

LouiseMace,AssistantHeadteacherCCS

When a student comes into our classroom we expect them to be prepared, both physically and mentally. They should have their equipment, complete any homework and be ready to develop their understanding. Why would we expect any less from the teachers? The simple answer is we should. Teachers should ensure that when they enter the classroom, they have made every effort to ensure they are ready to deliver the best possible lesson. To do that, they need to prepare for success.

How planning has helped me

When you have been teaching for over a decade it’s easy to get complacent about your ability to teach a lesson you know well. However when you start completing intellectual preparation (IP) for your lessons it becomes easy to see how much better your lessons can be. When you are intellectually preparing, it gives you the opportunity to not just think about the content that you are about to teach, but the students that you are about to teach. Whether you are an ‘experienced’ or ‘novice’ teacher, intellectual preparation gives you the opportunity to reflect on how exactly you will teach the lesson.

Getting buy in

The next step as with any implementation is ensuring that you get buyin from the staff to ensure that it is done effectively across the team. When delivering IP CPD I was able to talk about my own experiences and this helped ensure that the staff understood that this isn’t something that just needs to happen if you are an inexperienced teacher, we all should be doing it, because we can all get better..

In the meeting one thing was clear, history teachers love talking about their subject which enabled us to effectively consider lesson content from a student perspective. Through this we were able to share our experiences; teachers who had taught the topic before were able to share their experiences over what students have struggled with in the past, whilst teachers who had not taught the topic before are able to look at the lesson content with fresh eyes. Through the multiple gazes, we have been able to work together to ensure we have a good understanding of both the core knowledge and skills the students need to understand a topic, and the misconceptions over skills and knowledge that students might experience.

The results

These sessions have a clear impact which can be seen in both my own classes as I have carefully thought about not what I will teach but how I will teach it, making me more prepared and ready for the students. When visiting other lessons, it is easy to see when staff have spent effort completing their IP they are able to support students better and there is less teacher talk that isn’t necessary.

Additionally students appreciate this; when you appear to be prepared and know the lesson well, they can see it. Likewise when the opposite happens, they can also see it; if a student knows you are prepared for them they are more prepared to put in 100% for you.

What’s next for IP?

The next steps is to ensure the consistency of our IP both across the department and the school. Ensuring that IP is never a tick box, it is always something that is always done and always done with our students in mind. To achieve this IP needs to include the following:

• Who your students are

• What you need to ensure they understand

• How you are going to check for understanding

• The misconception that might occur

We must all remember ‘success occurs where preparation and opportunity meet’. We have the opportunity to to give our students incredible outcomes and we must prepare ourselves for this.

How to speak so students will listen

CharlotteWhelan,ExecutiveRegionalDirectorCST

I recently listened to the fifth most popular Ted Talk of all time- Julian Treasure’s ‘ How to speak so that people will listen’. You can read this blog either before or after you have watched it, but I highly recommend that you do (I mean both watch it and read this blog!) .

In his talk, Treasure talks about the bad habits speakers have that make people not want to listen. Recently I have been training staff on achieving orderly corridors. I have linked four of Treasure’s seven ‘bad habits’ and reasons why people are not listening when we speak to the high frequency errors we often make when out on corridors so students don’t listen to us.

Treasure’s Bad Habits

Gossip

Staff talking to each other and to individual students - it doesn’t have to be gossip - it can be chit chat - but it takes our eyes off the main purpose. We should be frontloading our expectations by giving students meaningful, achievable instructions to ensure they get to lessons on time and in an orderly manner.

Negativity

Coming across as ‘naggy’ is not conducive to getting students where they need to be in the right frame of mind and ensuring compliance to the rules. Instructions worded as ‘Don’t do that’, ‘not like that’ should be avoided.

Judgement

Students need to feel that we are all in it together. That staff and students are on the same team and that we need to all ensure that we are doing what is expected. They need to know that you will not accept disorder but they are not bad people, they just have bad or undeveloped habits that we are helping them fix.

Complaining

‘I’ve told you 100 times’, ‘I am sick of this, you know the rules’. These phrases seem obvious no nos but we have all heard it said- particularly when staff are weary. Top tip - tell them 101 times and tell them again so they know the rules.

Treasure then goes on to talk about the good foundations of speaking so that people will listen. Again, I have contextualised this according to how teachers make themselves heard in the corridors.

Treasures ‘Good Foundations’ for speaking so people will listen

Speak with:

Honesty

we state our expectations with truth and sincerity

Authenticity

we own our comments. We don’t sound like we are parroting rules that we don’t believe in

Integrity

we stick to the systems. We follow up non - compliance every time. We do what we say we are going to do.

Love

we deliver the instructions with warmth and good humour. We let students know it is for the good of the community and the school.

It is also worth noting that Treasure uses the acronym ‘HAIL’. This fits in with our ethos at Community Schools Trust.

To hail (verb)

Meaning one: to greet enthusiastically

we always say good morning or good afternoon in the corridor. Every interaction is the possibility to build a positive relationship.

Meaning two: to signal or attract attention

we signal to students what we expect them to do. We frontload our instructions so that students know how to be successful

Meaning three: to publicly praise or show approval for a person or an achievement

we praise the expected behaviour.

Treasure provides a ‘Toolbox’ for our voices so that we speak so that we are listened to. (Register, Timbre, Prosody, Pace, Pitch and Volume). He also recommends that we practise warming up our voice before we use it.

I have tried to encapsulate this voice variation in training staff on how to tackle poor corridor behaviour with the following formula

Promote - Frontload your expectations for the corridor conduct.

What staff say

• Single file, left hand side

• First time, every time

• Every second counts

• Quick, you don’t want to be late

How they say it

• They speak to no one in particular.

• They use a sing song voice (prosody).

• They use their ‘broadcast’ voice

• They are upbeat

• They demonstrate they expect compliance first time, every time by not using rising prosody. It’s a statement, not a question

Praise - Broadcast who is doing it right

What staff say

• Well done, Tia. First time every time - That’s the Petchey Way

• Brilliant boys. Lovely left line. It’s who we are, it’s what we do!

• Great Tao, you are hurrying to your lesson. Lots of merits to be had and you will definitely be in line for the golden ticket!

How they say it

• They speak directly to individuals

• They use prosody - upbeat, sing song voice

• They give loud specific praise, pointing out the required behaviours

• They promote the expected behaviour

• They reinforce the social norms and pro -social behaviours

‘Pick Up’ Phase - they follow up and sanction every infraction

What staff say

• Ok stop, young man. You are not on the left. Here is a slip. Now I don’t want to see that again.

• Come here please. Unfortunately you were not following the expectations for Petchey. It’s normal for Petchey to walk on the left.

• Ok you are not moving. You are standing here talking to your friends. Every second counts. Here is your slip.

How they say it

• They use a low, calm voice

• They speak from their diaphragm

• They are speak with authority

• They act surprised

• They slow down for emphasis

Warm up

Treasure finishes his Ted Talk by getting the audience up and out of their seats practising their voice warm ups. At CST we firmly approve as deliberate practice is the cornerstone of how we get better faster. We warm up (practise) in private, before we deliver to our audienceour wonderful students.

The Cognitive Tunnelling Phenomenon in CST

NaveedHussain,AssistantHeadteacherCCS

Cognitive tunnelling is an occurrence in which a pilot will not adequately perceive all pertinent information because of filtering based on preexisting expectations, initial impressions or other undefined factors.

You might have never heard about cognitive tunnelling. However, chances are, you have sometimes been a victim of it without knowing it.

It is also called Cognitive Capture and Inattentional Blindness: the mental state in which your brain focuses on one thing. As a result, your brain does not see other relevant data.

This perceptual blindness causes our attention to miss even the most obvious clues to the problem that can be right in front of us. So, how does this aviation phenomenon resonate with us as teachers in the

Floodlight Vs. Spotlight Focus

Metaphorically, a mind’s focus can be either like a floodlight dimly illuminating a large area, or it can be like a spotlight providing intense clarity on a single subject. Cognitive Tunnelling is when your mind’s focus remains in spotlight mode. Let’s imagine we have a 6 period day on a Monday across three separate classrooms. Now thinking about our EDI framework, at which point is it most likely Cognitive Tunnelling will occur? Phase 1 and 5, where the end of one lesson will determine how well you start your next lesson in your other classroom? Or would it be in your Phase 4 (SLOP) where you are going around live marking and updating the DPR using the 3:30:30 rule whilst trying to pick up on common misconceptions?

As practitioners and leaders, we often rely on various forms of automation to make our jobs easier and reduce the possibilities of cognitive tunnelling kicking in. For instance, intellectually preparing for our lessons and carefully selecting our SAF students to ensure any misconceptions are being picked up and addressed during the SLOP phase. Or setting the best possible conditions for every single lesson for a calm and orderly end to the lesson which in turn will help you get to your lesson in a timely and calm manner.

Mental Focus Area

The area of intense mental focus after the switch from floodlight to spotlight is most often the first suspected area of concern we encounter. However, rather than consider other relevant aspects, our mind is like a dog with a bone and gets locked into overly scrutinising a specific area. As a result, we are all too often blinded from seeing more obvious contributing factors. This is likely to occur with a challenging class where you may need to sanction students for low level disruption using our behaviour policy. This can have an impact on each and every phase of our lesson, causing anxiety to the teacher as they are trying to get through the lesson they have intellectually prepared for. What is the antecedent for this? You may ask. The answer is simple: use the CST EDI playbook consistently and effectively as a staff body where students have that consistency across every single class, irrespective of teacher or subject.

As teachers, we often encounter stressful situations that cause our brain’s focus to switch from floodlight mode to spotlight mode. While we often can’t prevent cognitive tunnelling from occurring simply by acknowledging that it is a biological adaptation, we can mentally force our brains to override this predisposition.

By recognizing cognitive tunnelling, we can force our minds to step above the problem by applying the CST EDI framework so we can see alternative solutions and answers.

The New Teach Like a Champion?

OmerPazar,HeadofPhysicsCCS

Tips for Teachers: Enhancing Teaching with Over 400 Simple Ideas

As educators, we all know that teaching is a complex task. It involves not just imparting knowledge to our students, but also motivating them, engaging them, and inspiring them to learn. And while we may have years of experience under our belts, there is always room for improvement. That’s where Craig Barton’s “Tips for Teachers” comes in - it contains over 400 simple ideas that can help us enhance our teaching and make it more effective.

The tips in the book come from two sources: the fantastic guests on Craig’s Tips for Teachers podcast, which include education heavyweights like Dylan Wiliam, Tom Sherrington, and Daisy Christodoulou, as well as talented teachers who are not household names; and what the author has learned from working with amazing teachers and students in hundreds of schools around the world.

The tips are arranged into themed chapters, with a logic to the order of the tips within each chapter. While some tips reference others earlier in the book, each tip is standalone, allowing readers to pick up the book and dive straight into a tip that interests them.

One issue that can arise is when students get stuck on a task or problem during Phase 4 (SLOP) of the CST Playbook and don’t know what to do next. This can lead to frustration and disengagement, which can ultimately hinder their learning progress. Fortunately, there are ways to address this issue, and two tips that have been particularly helpful are Tip 70 parts 4-5.

Teaching students what to do when they are stuck

Tip 70, part 4 suggests teaching students what to do when they are stuck. As behaviour expert Tom Bennett points out, if students’ default reaction when stuck is to raise their hand and wait for the teacher to come over, not much learning is happening, and behavioural issues may arise. To avoid this, establish a routine for what students should do when they are stuck. I have told students that if they are stuck, they should describe clearly where they are stuck on their mini-whiteboard. This makes it easy to scan for common misunderstandings.

Using mini-whiteboards

Tip 70, part 5 suggests using mini-whiteboards to support the book work used during Phase 2 (Presenting new materials) and the CST curriculum booklets used during Phase 4. Book work is a great way to encourage mass participation, but it can be challenging to check for understanding in a reliable way. Asking one student what they got, or asking if anyone got something different, can be unreliable as it relies on confidence, honesty, and effort from the students. Instead, ask students to copy their final answer on their mini-whiteboard and hold it up when ready. This provides a more reliable check for understanding, and you can focus on the answers that are most important.

I recently tried using Tip 70 parts 4-5 in my class, and I found them to be incredibly helpful. By teaching my students what to do when they get stuck, I was able to keep them engaged and focused on the task at hand, rather than getting frustrated and disengaging. Additionally, using mini-whiteboards as a way to check for understanding was much more efficient and reliable than traditional methods. I highly recommend giving these tips a try in your classroom to see if they can help your students stay engaged and motivated to learn.

In conclusion, “Tips for Teachers” is a valuable resource for educators who want to enhance their teaching with simple, practical ideas. While it may require experimentation and frustration to adapt the tips to one’s own situation, the effort will be worth it. As Craig states, “Teaching is complex, but there are simple ideas we can enact to help our teaching be more effective.”

Kebabs, EDI and SEN

EkhlasRahman,HeadteacherCCS

Waking up without an alarm, eating kebabs at 2am and getting a discounted travel card; my life as a uni student was drawing to a close and like millions of other graduates I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with my life.

A few months prior, I had completed a teaching taster course which paid undergraduates £600 to experience life in a school for 15 days to entice you to the teaching profession. Of course I was intrigued (and poor) and contacted my old school for a placement. My form tutor obliged and by the end of the ‘experience’, I was ready to use my student discount at Topman!

Not soon after, I received a call from my form tutor asking me if I would like to work in the SEN department as a TA. I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about, but the opportunity of earning an income while I pondered over my future career seemed like a sensible decision.

That stop-gap was longer than I planned and here I am still roaming around in this extended ‘gap year’. My experience as an educator was shaped in my very first year as a SEN TA and my passion for teaching stems from working with the most amazing human beings in both staff and students alike. It takes a special person to pursue a career educating others; it takes an extraordinary person to educate SEND students to the highest possible level everyday. It is incredibly hard and requires formidable patience!

Research into teachig students with SEND has historically been premised on the assumption SEND students are different therefore the presupposed position is that we have to teach these students differently. However research that looks into outcomes, not theories, has unsurprisingly highlighted, good teaching is good teaching regardless of the background of the students; whether their ability, social background or any other barriers to learning. The best teachers assess each student as an individual and draw upon effective teaching principles that apply to every student.

Below is an excerpt from the the EEF (Education Endowment Fund) research into SEND teaching in 2021:

“Explicit instruction refers to a range of teacher-led approaches focused on teacher demonstration followed by guided practice and independent practice. Several reviews of the research on effective support for pupils in mathematics and reading have provided support for explicit instruction. One popular approach to explicit instruction is Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’.

Explicit instruction is not just ‘lecturing’, ‘teaching by telling’, or ‘transmission teaching’; it usually begins with detailed teacher explanations, followed by extensive practice of routine exercises, and later moves on to independent work. Common aspects of explicit instruction include:

• teaching skills and concepts in small steps

• using examples and non-examples

• using clear and unambiguous language

• anticipating and planning for common misconceptions

Our EDI framework is designed to enable all students including those with SEN to learn in a structured manner that is consistently applied in all lessons. Phases 2&3 facilitates a scaffolded method to break down concepts, enabling the teacher to check for understanding at every stage to avoid misconceptions.

Below is from a C&C session delivered by Amy Brown (Deputy Headteacher, CCS) clearly breaking down how we can practically apply the CST EDI framework for students with ADHD:

SEN students need routine, structure and consistency more than anyone else. Our consistent application of our routines and structures provides our students with access to a rich learning experience and the perfect platform to flourish in the crazy world we live in!

Sometimes I reminisce about the good old uni days of waking up without an alarm, and spending the afternoon managing the consequences of eating a kebab at 2am. However, the prospect of living life without routine, structure and consistency... not having a career, a home, a family and 6 weeks paid summer holiday soon unravels…

Five steps for building the Habit

BenWalker,TeacherofScienceandDPRLeadUTCN

Research suggests 40% of our daily activities are habits.

That’s no bad thing.

Habits improve our efficiency and compound the benefits of the behaviour we have formed. So how do we go about building something like DPR use into our daily habits? It is not what you might think, or as easy. The research suggests setting goals and being motivated is not going to cut it when it comes to building habits. What works are systems, and habit expert James Clear reckons “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems’’. So what systems can we use to promote the habit of DPR use?

Start with a small habit

“Make it so easy you can’t say no” – Leo Babauta. Break down the new habit into small chunks. Link your lesson to a KO on the DPR or celebrate success at the end of the lesson with a judgement. Focus on and accomplish one tiny step at a time.

Increase the habit

Habit-Stacking

Get back on the horse

Start small and increase your expectations. Link your lesson to the KO and make judgements during your live marking. Small improvements compound over time.

This is something you will already do without realising: take your new habit and fit it amongst established routines..

a. Meet at the threshold

b. Ten second countdown

c. Register

d.

Open the DPR

We all make mistakes and fall off track. The difference between building a habit and losing it is getting back on track quickly. The research shows the sooner we get back on the horse, the more likely we are to maintain the Habit. Be consistent, not perfect.

Break your habit down

Once you have established your DPR use, you can break it down and use sections of it to the best advantage of your class.

From IP to practice

EloiseHart,HeadofSocialSciencesFGCS

Every lesson that we teach requires us to think about multiple things in one go. For the whole 50 minutes we are constantly doing something. Planning for intellectual preparation (IP) sessions required me to build my own knowledge of what a successful lesson looks like, and break down each of those things that we do within those 50 minute lessons. When I first started planning IP sessions, I took a close look at my own lessons and began to reflect on how my delivery could be improved and what really needed to be thought about beforehand, and used this to guide the planning stages of the sessions.

Our first IP session as a Geography department had a focus on the breaking down of lessons into small chunks, to allow for checking for understanding, before moving on to the next part. That first session largely consisted of me modelling the delivery of an upcoming lesson with the department, the delivery through the curriculum booklet, and how I would break down the content into smaller milestones for students. This allowed me to model both the IP for the department, as well as how our curriculum booklets could be adapted to suit the needs of our own individual classes. I feel like this was hugely beneficial to the team, as a Geography lesson can be quite bulky in content, and without that successful breakdown at phase 2, our students would become overloaded with the information.

I feel like the IP sessions have had a great impact on everyone’s teaching and learning. We are now addressing things that we maybe would not have thought of before. Having curriculum booklets and centralised resources as a tool for teaching and learning is invaluable, but if not delivered properly they become wasted. Recently we have been working collaboratively on tackling the challenges related to fieldwork exam questions; how we can teach to the top through our use of language such as ‘reliability’, ‘validity’ and ‘accuracy’, and how we can plan for misconceptions regarding exam questions and the shift in assessment objectives for these questions compared to other units.

These sessions allow us to develop our practice as a department, and make improvements to each of our phases of the lesson. I have seen team members really thrive following their IP allowing them to make sure they are targeting SAF students through their questioning, providing strong and supportive model answers for our students and even preplanning their live marking to support students in phase 4.

Moving forward, our next few IP sessions will be targeted at looking at phase 3 and 4, to make sure that we already know beforehand how exactly we are going to support our students for that SLOP part of the lesson.

Scaffolding for students with cognition and learning needs

RobClark,AssistantHeadteacherFGCS

The area of cognition and learning is the most common type of need for pupils on SEN support. According to the DfE (2017), 50% of secondary school pupils on SEN support had cognition and learning difficulties listed as their primary type of need.

“Scaffolding is a metaphor for temporary support that is removed when no longer required. It may be visual, verbal or written” (EEF, 2020).

This temporary assistance is provided for students so they can successfully complete tasks that they cannot yet do independently and with a high rate of success. Teachers select powerful visual, verbal and written supports; carefully calibrate them to students’ performance and understanding. Best practice is always when teachers use them flexibly, evaluate their effectiveness and gradually remove them once they are no longer needed. Some scaffolds are planned prior to the lesson and some are provided responsively during instruction (McLeskey et al, 2020).

Visual scaffolds

Visual scaffolds may support a pupil to know what equipment they need, the steps they need to take or what their work should look like. Examples of effective visual scaffolds include a task planner, story frames, a list of steps a pupil needs to take, model examples of work and images that support vocabulary learning.

Verbal scaffolds

Providing a verbal scaffolding may be reteaching a tricky concept to a group of pupils, or using questioning to identify and address any misconceptions. This may sound like the following: “Let’s look at this together.., “What have you done before that will help youwith this task” and “Don’t forget your work needs to include..”

Written scaffolds

A written scaffold will typically be provided for a pupil to sup port them with an independent written task. It could be the notes made from class discussion. It could even be the child’s own previous work. Further effective examples include, word banks, writing frames and sentence starters.

It is important to consider the cognitive load of our students with cognition and learning needs and the research suggests teachers should reduce the load of sensory information and its associated processing. Work by Dockrell and Shield (2006) using a randomised control design at classroom level has shown that children with SEN are more negatively impacted to a significant degree by the background babble of typical busy classroom environments. The most supportive practitioners will declutter their slides or curriculum booklets, chunk information, declutter classrooms and use standardised and predictable routines (EDI framework) for students.

Dockrell and Shield (2006) work also highlights the issue of sensory overload for students with additional needs. The noise conditions significantly impacted on verbal literacy task performance for children with SEN. Children of typical development also had difficulty in the background classroom noise condition. They performed worse in persistent babble conditions when doing non-verbal tasks but were less impacted on verbal ones, for example reading.

At the CST, we insist on golden silence during phase 4 (SLOP) and no split attention in order to reduce the redundancy effect during teacher talk (SLANT). These standardised routines alongside our intellectual preparation for scaffolding are essential to the success and progress of our SEND students.

EDI & ‘The Talent Code’

MichaelGhany,HeadofEnglishWA

It was a brisk and bright morning in the Spring of more years ago than I care to recount. I was midway through my university degree and sipping a piping-hot, strong black coffee as I waded through that week’s heap of seminar reading. Occasionally, I would pause to watch the Ilford traffic pass, as if gleaning some existential gold dust from their metallic exteriors…or, more realistically, being wilfully distracted as I waited for my mentor to be just on time.

He arrived breathless. I almost forgot: Bobby would always leave a little late from his home (a 15 minute walk or 7 minute sprint away). Bobby would have to run not to be late; he abhorred being late. And each week, he would leave a little less time to challenge himself that bit further and ensure his muscles kept up with his strict ethos. “6 minutes is the target, by next month.” He would say panting, hands on his thighs, as he briefly looked up. Bobby was in his mid 40s, but most thought he was a lot younger. He was an accomplished martial artist, had a six-pack and knew just about everyone.

“You look like a teacher sitting there,” he said. “I’m thinking about it…after uni perhaps…” I replied tentatively.

“What you reading?”

“The new politics of South America’s ‘pink tide’.”

“Here’s what I’m reading.” He dove into his rucksack, casting aside the mountain boulders or whatever was in there increasing the gravitational stress of his run. Withdrawing a cute, novella-sized book, its pristine white cover and gold writing gleamed in the sunlight, and my life changed in the same moment.

When I told him I hadn’t read ‘The Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle, his jaw hit the floor. It was like I had informed him of my inadequacy for never having watched ‘Goodfellas’ or ‘Avatar 2’. “But you know it explains… pretty much everything?” He clarified, “It’s everything you need to know, to be incredible at anything you want.” Anything you want. That idea alone captured me. Maybe I could get through this seminar reading a bit quicker, then?

So, let’s get to the meat of it.

Whilst confessing to be no expert of neuroscience, the book explains it thus: your brain is effectively lots and lots of wires all tangled together in intricate patterns. These wires we keep in a box and that box we call: your head. We’re increasingly more wireless these days, but if you remember what it was like when you shoved your earphones in your

pocket without anything to divide them, only to find they were an inextricable mess later that day - then multiply that by a few billion - that’s the idea. God bless ear pods, by the way.

Yet, it is the idea that these wires are different where things get really interesting. Some of your wires are the real KitKat chunky/HDMI ones that you connect a laptop to a TV screen with. Whilst others are like those cheap £2 earphones you bought from Woolworths thinking, “They’ll do.” They won’t. God bless ear pods 2.0.

So, what causes this? What is the wrapping that coils around the wire to make some of them thicker and faster firing whilst others thinner and weaker? Apparently, it’s this pretty magical stuff called ‘myelin’ that slowly wraps itself around any neural pathway you consistently fire. The more you do something - the more myelin wrapping - and so the thicker the wire gets. Your thickest wire/neural pathway is (probably) your heart beating in case you were wondering. But I didn’t even realise there was a wire for that. And that’s the thing, some wires fire so quickly, with such efficacy, we don’t even have to think about the actions they produce or feel the stress of having to enact their process. This is where we need to think about how ‘The Talent Code’ applies to EDI and how we want all our students, in all our subjects, to be wired like the more fortunate siblings of Medusa.

I don’t drive. Yet everyone that does always tells me at first it’s a ghastly experience with too many things going on at once: the handbrake, the clutch, looking out the rearview mirror, looking out the rearview mirror, the steering and so on. Driving initially is like an orchestra in your head, where the strings are tuned to D minor, the woodwind is an unflattering G sharp and the percussion didn’t show today but billed you with a headache. Things get a little easier with each deep practice you engage with and then one day you find yourself on a road and your anxiety drops a little and you realise you're driving Jack, you're driving.

At that blissful moment of “I’ve got this!” your neural pathways have become so used to firing, as a result of the thicker myelin sheath encasing them, that it does not require as much effort and you can start to focus on the more pernickety minutiae of the experience like ensuring a smooth ride for your passengers or performing an impromptu three point turn into a space that is way too small. It’s not necessary but desirable. And moreover, it’s possible, it’s the aim and it’s what we want to achieve. Now, let’s make that three point turn synonymous with GCSE results and we have the EDI and ‘The Talent Code’.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this so far, so please just bear with me for another few sentences before you email your LM to tell them this is the best article in ‘Habits’ ever.

Daniel Coyle researched examples from all over the world and sought to identify what made the greats great. What were the conditions around The Beatles and Michael Jordan, the Bronte Sisters and tennis prodigies, to find the central secret to their success. He found the below:

“Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. To get good, it’s helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill. To sum up: it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. There is no substitute for attentive repetition.”

Before I joined CST, my teaching pedagogy, based on ‘The Talent Code’ was to ensure that students wrote in every lesson. Daniel Coyle calls it deep practice; we call it SLOP.

“Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.”

Skills are really just circuits in your brain, then. There is something very egalitarian about that and perhaps it’s why teachers have this unyielding faith and vision of helping every student in every class achieve to the highest possible standard. Of course, this looks different for every individual. Daniel Coyle does account 5% of talent to the way we usually think of it: permanent, immutable genetic characteristics but the other 95%, he posits, is up for grabs. How many times are you willing to walk in the dark room and bump into the sofa, the coffee table, the TV? It certainly helps if you’ve got someone with a spotlight behind you and that’s exactly where the role of the mentor steps in. During live feedback, you are that spotlight, helping students to navigate their way through the curriculum dark with the majesty of

Batman at the ballet.

‘The [deep practice] sweet spot is that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp...’

And all of sudden it hit me, Bobby was using the Talent Code in his everyday life, in everything he did. He was deep practising, SLOPing all over the place. Every time he did martial arts, worked out, ran a little faster to not be late…probably even as he talked to me - he was consciously refining his deep practice skills. In honesty, the last part made me feel a little uncomfortable. I had to remind myself he was a good man and not a complete robot and I was not his victim. If anything, he had shone the spotlight in the dark room and substituted it for the glorious Ilford city sun.

I think it is far too easy to make a lurch for being profound. Yet, all these years later and looking back, that conversation and that text really changed the way I thought about learning. Hopefully, in the way you apply this to your own life and as part of the EDI, it will change yours and your student’s lives too.

Being Deliberate About Deaf Awareness

It’s the first day of the term and you have arrived to work well-prepared to welcome and deliver the curriculum to all your students. You are determined to implement the EDI playbook in every single lesson! You receive an email from the Teacher of the Deaf sharing with you one-page profiles of deaf students that you will be teaching. There are mentions of the students’ diagnosis at birth, ‘severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss’, pictures of the audiogram, cochlear implants, transmitters in lessons and diagnoses of multiple other needs…

You might be thinking “I have never taught a deaf student before; I never learnt about this on my teacher training programme! Will there be specialist support in my class? What is this soundfield system? I don’t know how to use a Roger Pen?!” All these questions will no doubt leave you in panic mode!

It was essential that we trained our staff on how to get the best of the EDI Playbook to ensure that it meets the needs of our 11 deaf students.

The Planning

The impact of hearing loss affects a students’ ability to listen and learn, their attention and concentration, language development, social skills, auditory memory and working memory - which ultimately impacts progress. This all meant that timely and effective action was needed as ‘every second counts!’.

At Petchey, effective education of all deaf students is a whole school responsibility.

When I looked at the EDI playbook, I strategised and formed an adjoining plan outlining how staff could make reasonable adjustments to the framework, promote good

strategies and incorporate them into their intellectual preparation. In order to effectively share this with all staff, both new and longstanding, we decided that this pressing CPD need could be addressed through a specialised Teaching and Learning coffee morning.

I wanted to design a session in which they tell the teachers what they need and how they can be supported in different phases of the EDI playbook. I met with a sample of our deaf to get the ball rolling and we unpicked the routines for each phase. They decided on the strategies that would help them and I soon realised that it would be best if key messages came from the students themselves.

The Session

It was the best attended coffee morning yet! We covered:

• the impact of hearing loss on student outcomes and progress

• the complex technology many of our students use in the classroom

• how we can use the EDI playbook to remove barriers to learning for deaf students.

Three brave students then led our teachers through the deliberate practice for Phase 1 and coached us on:

checking they were wearing correct equipment at the threshold, checking devices were ‘connected’ ensuring students were seated at the front to facilitate lip reading.

The Intended Impact

It was a successful session where our students felt empowered in showing their teachers how to help them and staff too felt a great sense of achievement and confidence.

One teacher said “I felt hugely inspired; what a start to the day!” Our teachers came away with a better understanding of how to manage and minimise the impact of a student’s deafness on their learning by ensuring that all students have full access to the curriculum, develop their learning skills and, ultimately, attain the best possible levels of academic achievement.

Embedding this training in every lesson will ensure consistently high quality, and genuinely inclusive, experience for our deaf students which will make a positive impact on their educational, social and emotional outcomes.

SalmaAdam,TeacheroftheDeafTPA

‘Deafness isn’t a learning disability, and with the right support, there’s no reason why a deaf child can’t achieve as much as a hearing child.’

(National Deaf Children’s Society, 2019).

The Redundancy Effect

RaeanneMeade,AssistantHeadteacherTPA

The Misconception

In the ever-progressive world of educational and pedagogical jargon, we often talk about the ‘split attention effect’, a phrase that we understand to mean the impact of our students having divided attention in the classroom.

Now, whilst this would seem like the most apt term to use, research shows that we have been using the wrong terminology; thankfully, mistakes are the portals of discovery!

In his article on Cognitive Load Theory, educational researcher Ollie Lovell brings to light this glaring misconception. In actual fact, the split attention effect is when multiple pieces of information that we want students to integrate in their minds are not presented in an integrated form.

By integrating the information as shown in the right hand diagram, you are significantly reducing the cognitive load of your students as it reduces the pressure on their working memory. Small wins!

Getting it Right: The Redundancy Effect

Ok so, if that’s the split attention effect, then what have we really been talking about every time we try to combat the ‘split attention’ of our students? Well, this is actually called the Redundancy Effect. This is when students’ attention is divided or they are attempting to multitask in a lesson. By fostering this in our lessons, we are doing our students a disservice as multitasking is actually a myth! Yes, you heard it here first. When we think we are multitasking, we are actually switching from one task to the other, like juggling. Evidence shows that when switching in this way, you are likely to be slower, make more mistakes, be less creative and remember less of what you do.

(Stolen Focus, Johann Hari)

Essentially, the key skills that we want to develop in our students are at risk if we are not purposefully combatting the Redundancy Effect in our lessons. Therefore, it is crucial for us to eliminate unnecessary information and manage redundant distractions in the classroom so that students can focus on the key learning taking place.

Let’s apply this to a lesson; if we allow redundant information and distractions to take hold, it will undoubtedly result in:

• increased misconceptions across the class

• lack of confidence in students

• limited retention of knowledge

As the lesson progresses and students move on to their independent work, we are more likely to encounter:

• poor quality Shed Loads of Practice (SLOP) as a result of missed information

• an increased number of ‘hands up’ students who draw you away from your strategic live marking plan

• challenges in effectively monitoring MAS and SAF students

• increased disruption to lessons.

Ultimately, you end up spending the whole lesson with raised blood pressure levels because instead of meaningfully marking and monitoring students’ progress, you are frantically firefighting.

Reducing Redundant Moments

So, what steps can we take to reduce the impact of the Redundancy Effect in our lessons? A lot of these steps are already embedded in our EDI framework but here are a few explicit strategies.

• Brighten Lines: changes in activities have clear beginnings and ends - they are visible and crisp. The way we do this is: ‘When I say go and not a second before...’

• SLANT: we ensure precious seconds of learning are not wasted and we encourage habits of attention; by ensuring students track the teacher and have nothing in their hands, we are minimising any distractions for our students

• Explicit instructions that are clear and concise

• ‘I do’ modelling phase: reassure students that they will be able to copy it down after you have taken them through the steps as a class

• Insisting on SHAPEd answers to ensure clarity of understanding for whole class

• Chunking activity and information: bite size your information with checking for understanding in between the chunks

Of course there are many other strategies to consider. I think the real question in all of this is: are we delivering our lessons purposefully? As teachers, we already do so many great things subconsciously because they are embedded into our daily practice. Now, imagine the increased effectiveness of these strategies if we implemented them more intentionally.

Let’s challenge ourselves and each other to ensure that every teaching moment is essential, constructive and purposefully planned for progress.

habits.