HWRK Magazine: Issue 23 - November 2022

We work tirelessly to change the lives of those affected by bullying and we know we make a difference. We see it in the way young people engage in our projects, how we empower them to Make a Difference and how they develop confidence and learn new skills.

By developing a positive ethos across a whole school/organisation community, we can create an environment that meets the emotional, academic and social needs of pupils and staff. Creating an anti-bullying and respectful ethos is a powerful way to Inspire Change.

Our Youth Ambassadors are a dynamic team of young volunteers working together to help deal with the issue of bullying. They are committed and dedicated and all have a passion to Make A Difference in their local communities. The programme is open all year round and you can join wherever you live and whatever your background and interests are.

LEADERSHIP

24. TOP TIPS FOR nEw HEADS OF DEPARTMEnTS

‘Saliba’. The shared norms and meaning of football fan are taught, caught and reinforced during the rituals and ceremonies of supporting that team. The same applies in our educational settings. When lead a formal assembly, and the other adults in our school expect the students to file in quietly, sit in their registration groups and listen Competition, and the other adults want the students to sit with their friends, to shout, cheer and sing along. Our new students in Year are quickly learning that while you represent your House with pride and passion, we are ultimately still one community. We cheer everyone on, we celebrate everyone. The subtle nuances of our shared norms can only be observed when we are together in shared practices, At the core of our concentric circles are the ‘values and beliefs’ of the members of the organisation. This is what makes culture so tricky to shape and influence because has to do with the individual beliefs of the people that make up the community. Every single person in your setting contributes to the collective values and beliefs of the school. Everyone. The governing body, the Headteacher, the

59. THE FICTIOn AbOUT wRITInG nOn-FICTIOn

Why has non-fiction writing had such a troubled time and what can be done to teach students how to write excellent non-fiction pieces?

62. 9 STRATEGIES TO EnHAnCE STUDEnTS’ ExPERIEnCE OF ART In PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Nine easy-to-implement strategies to raise the profile of Art and to enhance the experiences of the pupils in your school.

CONTRIBUTORS

WRITTEN BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS

Christian Mba

@IAmMisterMba

Christian Mba is an Associate Assistant Principal at a secondary school in Northamptonshire. He is also the host of The En Pointe Podcast (@enpointepod).

Isaac Moore

@isaacmoore7

Isaac is a Deputy Headteacher at a secondary school in Berkshire. He leads on curriculum implementation and teacher development. His interests include school culture and cognitive science.

Kristian Still

@KristianStill

Kristian Still is Deputy Head Academic at Boundary Oak School in fareham. Author of the soon to be released Test-Enhanced Learning - A practical guide to improving academic outcomes for all students.

Donal Hale

@HaleDonal

Donal Hale is currently Curriculum Leader of English at Trinity Academy Leeds. Having also held posts as Lead Practitioner for Teaching and Learning and Research Lead, he is passionate about teaching English and developing evidence-informed practice.

Chris Curtis

@xris32

Chris Curtis is an English teacher and head of department with over a decade’s experience in education. Chris is forever reflecting on what aspects of his teaching work best for his students and, as an avid reader and blogger, is a big believer in sharing the practical solutions that he finds to tackling difficult problems in the classroom.

Adele Darlington

@MrsDarlington

Adele is a primary teacher with over 20 years experience and is the author of 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Art (Bloomsbury). She is a member of SLT and has taught across the primary phase but specialises in EYfS and KS1, leading on phonics, early reading and art.

Darren Leslie @dnleslie

Darren is a PT Teaching & Learning in Scotland. He is also the host of Becoming Educated, a podcast that aims to discover the secrets to great teaching.

Emily Weston

@primaryteachew

Emily has been teaching for 7 years, with 6 years spent in Primary - 4 of these in Year 6 and the last year within a secondary school in Swindon as a Transition Teacher.

Adam Woodward

@adamjames317

Year 4 class teacher, book lover, curriculum broadener and history nut. Interested in how to improve outcomes for all and developing aspirations.

Chris Woolf

Chris Woolf is delighted to be the International Director at Wellington College International. Prior to this he was founding Headteacher of a school in north London judged ‘outstanding’ in all categories by Ofsted. He was Head of Senior School at an international school in Beijing when it was named British International School of the Year.

Henry Sauntson

@HenrySauntson

Henry Sauntson is a Senior Leader and SCITT Director, based in Peterborough. His enthusiasm and interest lies primarily with teacher education and development, especially in the early career stages - he believes in the two ‘eff’ words of efficiency and effectiveness as hallmarks of teacher practice. Henry has contributed material to a number of journals and spoken at a range of events that celebrate the use of evidence in education; we need to be informed, not led.

George Vlachonikolis

George and Will met each other more than 17 years ago in the same training platoon in the British Army. They served together on operations in Afghanistan in 2010/11 and both left the Army shortly after to become teachers and then Heads of Department. In 2022, they both moved into new Assistant Headteacher roles at their respective schools.

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EDITORIAL:

WHAT ARE WE PREPARING OUR STUDENTS FOR?

What are we preparing our students for?

During a recent debate in the UK Youth Parliament, Izzy Garbutt a Youth MP for Wigan and Leigh, delivered a powerful monologue, in which she criticised the exam-laden, memorisation-heavy, academic education which has failed to prepare her for the world.

Many have taken to Twitter, TikTok and even the national press, to support or criticise her claims. In some ways, she is right - there are ways in which the current system does fail many students. Exams can’t measure everything and some things can’t be measured at all. In our pursuit of educational excellence, there are also many things we wish we could squeeze into our jam-packed curriculum and an equal number of things we might wish to take out.

However, there are also ways in which Izzy Garbutt might also be wrong. The education system that failed to prepare her for the world is the same system that educated her enough to become a member of the prestigious Youth Parliament; a member who has, for a short time at least, set a small portion of the internet on fire. Hardly a hallmark of a “failing” system.

But this whole a air does raise an important question, one that I believe we should revisit periodically: what are we trying to prepare our students for?

Recently, I presented at researchED Durham on what classroom teachers might learn from grassroots football coaching. Aside from the pedagogical principles of Rosenshine, Sweller, Lemov and others, there was one particular point that I really wanted to get across to the teachers present: “narrate what you see”.

This is a phrase I’d picked up during my own FA coaching qualification. The idea is simple enough: if you’re putting players

into complex, high-intensity, constantlychanging situations, then those players will struggle to maintain focus on what matters and why it matters. E ective coaches narrate the “what matters and why it matters” to their players constantly. Without that narration, the players might not make the link between what they are doing, how they should do it and why they should do it that way. Once they “get it”, they level up.

Now, if we are preparing our students for the ever-changing complexities of “life”, “careers”, or anything else that the talented Youth MP for Wigan and Leigh has on her wish list, then we really do need to think long and hard about how we design and enact the curriculum. And we need to think equally hard about how we narrate it to our students.

We should share our ideas on how to make our curriculum “meaningful beyond the exams” and that we signpost it for our students. After all, it’s their curriculum.

There’s a good chance, of course, that many teachers are doing a fantastic job of this. However, from my own experience, it’s easy to think we are doing it well, without the students actually noticing what we want them to notice. We need to be intentional about setting out why the things they are studying matter so much and when that information or those skills will matter to them.

You are probably teaching communication skills deliberately and doing so really well, but have you told the students that this is something you are actively doing? And have you discussed examples where good communication skills would matter in their lives (and also the true cost of poor communication skills)?

You are probably teaching students how to calculate “mortgages”, “interest” and “tax” when you cover percentages in Maths - but do your students realise that this is how it will help them in life? It’s a dull topic, but

one that will no doubt save them a lot of sleepless nights when they’re older. The list goes on and on.

When I hear about schools, teachers or the education system being criticised for the way it fails to prepare our students for the “real world”, I do think the critics are missing something huge though. The world is constantly changing. The “stu ” in the curriculum will come into and go out of “usefulness” for di erent students at di erent times and we don’t know who it will apply to, or when, and if it will at all.

All we can do, with any curriculum, is to teach what we can and model to students the behaviours we want them to adopt as children and later as adults too.

The truth (if there ever is one) is that teachers are the living embodiment of the thing we are really teaching our students. We are teaching by example what kind of person they could become. We should be (and I believe as a profession we are) the very type of people our students should be seeking to emulate: people who are knowledgeable about the world, are curious, seek self-improvement and routinely put others’ needs before our own. These are the teachers I see and hear about, day in and day out and I learn from all of you every day.

A knowledge-rich curriculum, taught e ectively provides a passport to success and removes barriers to the most competitive of career opportunities. But that’s not our only mission.

Aside from instilling our students with the now-infamous quadratic formula, we’re preparing them to live good and meaningful lives.

Not such a bad curriculum after all.

Andy McHugh Editor | HWRK Magazine

How Do we SHape ScHool culture?

By Christian Mba

Ask any Marvel fan: when Thanos snapped his fingers, everything changed. Half the human population was wiped out in an instant. There were no corners of the earth that were untouched; the mortal landscape had been irrevocably transformed. Many of the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, disintegrated into dust.

Watching these events transpire on the silver screen prompted the question for

the audience: where are the heroes? Where are the heroines? Will they return? There is something comforting about knowing who the heroes and heroines are. They serve as the embodiment of something bigger than themselves. They also provide us an insight into the wider culture they exist in. I also think it is a question that teachers and school leaders would do well to consider as they reflect on the organisational culture of their own settings.

In their paper, Leading and Managing People in Education, Bush and Middlewood (2005) identify four central features of organisational culture that I believe are essential for healthy school cultures, ‘heroes and heroines’ being one. Imagine with me that each of these features are four concentric circles. For the purpose of this article, I have begun with the outer layer because I think this is the factor which is most easy to observe.

School culture is a complex thing to define and harder still to create. In his article, Christian Mba argues that by focusing on four vital elements, you can influence the way your school culture develops its own unique identity.

As you walk around your setting, who are the heroes and heroines among your student body? How would a guest know? Is it easy to observe to an outsider? In many schools, students are awarded badges or special ties or some other physical item to indicate their status eg. Head Girl, House Captain, student council, anti-bullying ambassador.

Some may view these as trite trinkets made of a bit of plastic and metal, but they are important icons that communicate something of the cultures they inhabit. My daughter recently received a Blue Peter badge in the post for submitting some evidence of her playing sports for a team. Nobody would be able to convince her (or me) that her badge is not valuable. It is valuable because the Blue Peter presenters, the BBC, and the wider national audience recognise it as valuable. In schools, we ‘make the weather’ for our young people. If we treat a badge for citizenship or a gold tie for Head Boy as important, then it will be important to our young people too.

These symbols will often be proffered as part of the ‘rituals and ceremonies’ that exist in our settings. This is the second ring of our concentric circles. By rituals, I am of course not describing animal sacrifice or rain dances, but we do have rituals we perform in our schools. Assemblies.

Sports Days. House Competitions. School productions. Summer fetes. These are just some of the different activities and events we organise our calendars around during an academic year. It’s the ‘software for the mind’ (Gruenert and Whitaker, 2017) that shapes our organisational culture.

I think it is important to remember this following the system crash we have experienced over the last two years. As we reboot, there may be a temptation to delete some of these essential system processes because it is expedient, costeffective or time-efficient, but I personally believe this would be a critical error. These rituals and ceremonies are hard drives by which we both share our heroes and heroines and store our shared norms.

Imagine now our concentric circles have reached the inner ring. Bush and Middlewood (2005) describe the significance of ‘shared norms and meanings’. My brother-in-law got me tickets to see Arsenal play at the Emirates at the start of the season. We beat Fulham 2-1. Despite the fact I was sitting next to a complete stranger, when Gabriel scored in the 86th minute, we hugged and jumped up and down like two toddlers in a reception playground. When the tune of the 1958 song ‘Tequila’ rang out around the stadium, we all knew to replace the

song title with our centre back’s name, ‘Saliba’. The shared norms and meaning of a football fan are taught, caught and reinforced during the rituals and ceremonies of supporting that team. The same applies in our educational settings.

When I lead a formal assembly, I and the other adults in our school expect the students to file in quietly, sit in their registration groups and listen attentively. However, when I lead a House Competition, I and the other adults want the students to sit with their friends, to shout, cheer and sing along. Our new students in Year 7 are quickly learning that while you represent your House with pride and passion, we are ultimately still one community. We cheer everyone on, we celebrate everyone. The subtle nuances of our shared norms can only be observed when we are together in shared practices, activities and events.

At the core of our concentric circles are the ‘values and beliefs’ of the members of the organisation. This is what makes culture so tricky to shape and influence because it has to do with the individual beliefs of the people that make up the community. Every single person in your setting contributes to the collective values and beliefs of the school. Everyone. The governing body, the Headteacher, the

“As we reboot, there may be a temptation to delete some of these essential system processes because it is expedient, cost-effective or time-efficient, but I personally believe this would be a critical error.”

senior leaders, the pastoral and subject leaders, the teachers, the teaching support staff, the site staff, the catering team, the administration team, the reception team, the parents and carers, and of course, the students. How do you ensure that everybody believes and values the same things in the same way at the same time?

I don’t think you can.

But I believe we can influence the way people think and behave in particular settings. We do it all the time in other areas of our lives. The way I cheered and sang while watching The Gunners is completely different to how I behaved watching The Lion King in the theatre with my daughter. We clapped politely at appropriate points and waited to the end of the performance to give rapturous applause. In the interval, I traded my hearty meat pie at the Emirates for an exquisite - but expensive - tub of ice cream.

There would be no chanting or hugging of strangers. The setting influenced how I behaved for the greater good of that particular organisation’s purposes.

Our learning environments are central to how we communicate our values and beliefs to everyone. What are the espoused values and beliefs of your school? Are they reflected in what everybody actually does? How important is teaching and learning? What are the shared norms? How balanced is the curriculum? What are the rituals and ceremonies? What do they communicate? Who are the heroes and heroines? Why are they given that status? How does everybody else know? The answers to these questions will go some way in helping to sketch the contours of the organisational culture in our schools.

As for Thanos, that mad Titan, he would be eventually vanquished by the Avengers. The blip, that period when the absence

of heroes at full strength was keenly felt, seemed to reinvigorate, reiterate and renew their sense of purpose.

In order to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic, we have understandably had to cancel proms and Sports Days, move assemblies and Open Evenings online, scale back school productions and awards ceremonies; schools have not been able to function at full strength.

My hope is that, as schools begin to return to normality after the last few years of disruption, we too would be renewed in our shared sense of purpose. For many of our young people, school represents one of the most significant periods in their lives for the forming and shaping of their beliefs, values and worldviews. As teachers and school leaders, we shape the future. In this way, I think it is actually teachers who are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

“In schools, we ‘make the weather’ for our young people. If we treat a badge for citizenship or a gold tie for Head Boy as important, then it will be important to our young people too.”

InstructIonal coachIng vs EducatIvE MEntorIng In Early carEEr tEachIng

By Henry Sauntson

There is no such thing as a ‘general’ skill; any generic concepts need to be underpinned by swathes of domainspecific knowledge. You don’t train just to be a ‘footballer’ – you train to be a Midfielder, a Goalkeeper. You don’t train to be a ‘Doctor’ – you specialise. If we are to get mentoring right in schools – and in so doing ensuring that Induction of new teachers is fit for purpose – we must first understand that there is no such thing as a ‘good general mentor’; mentors must specialise also.

Their specialism is bred out of their environment, their school setting, and we know that schools are complex environments where culture is often determined by Leadership and decisionmaking, priorities; if new teacher induction is not a priority area then this impacts directly on the perceived importance of the role of the mentor.

In ‘Peak’, Erikson talks of how judgment is made of expertise through the eye of experience – the assumption that ‘a teacher who has been teaching for twenty years must be better than one who has been teaching for five’ (p.25) but, in reality, the research indicates that once an ‘acceptable’ level of performance or automaticity has been reached, additional years of practice don’t necessarily lead to any improvement –‘automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve’; this therefore begs the question – how do we keep encouraging teachers to improve? Or indeed, to want to improve?

Much research has indicated how professional environments are key drivers in teacher development, and recent work by Hobbiss & Sims (2020) has also suggested that teachers hit plateaus and ‘stagnate’ if they aren’t challenged; the issue being that the effort required to translate

challenge into change is significant, and sometimes the status quo is a happy place to be – why change what seems to be working? That’s the problem – maybe it isn’t.

One big ‘change’ in the role of the Mentor is the advent of the Early Career Framework, supporting the development of new teachers alongside their statutory Induction process; the ECF is not an assessment model, it is a professional development model.

One of the main features of the Early Career Framework is the increased focus on mentors and mentorship; there is greater accountability built into the system for mentors’ professional development and therefore their self-efficacy. The principles on which the ECF approach for mentors is built are largely beholden to the concept of Deliberate Practice (Erikson, Deans for

Is instructional coaching the best vehicle for professional development of Early Career Teachers, or should we focus on mentoring instead? Henry Sauntson explores this dilemma…

Impact) – a focussed, granular approach to teacher development using a process that follows these five stages:

Push beyond one’s comfort zone

Work towards welldefined, specific goals

Focus intently on practice activities

Receive and respond to high-quality feedback

Develop a mental model of expertise (Deans, p.3)

The proposed method is for the Mentor to adopt the role of ‘Instructional Coach’ for the Early Career Teacher, moving along the continuum from Directive to Facilitative, from teller to listener. Now, there are caveats here; is Instructional Coaching the right approach for Early Career Development? Much has been written about Instructional Coaching and its benefits – the coach must have expert knowledge of teaching in order to provide useful and targeted feedback; IC has been shown to improve teachers’ instructional practices, the quality of teacher/child interactions, student motivation et al – but it isn’t as simple as a silver bullet, or a quick win – it’s an ethos, a systemic approach.

I would argue that Mentors assigned to ECTs to support them through their engagement with the ECF and their

progress through Statutory Induction don’t have the time to fully engage in proper training and development as Instructional Coaches in their own right; sometimes, the more Novice / Expert dynamic of the Mentor / Mentee relationship is more appropriate.

When we pick up concepts and approaches off the shelf and apply them liberally in name, we perhaps don’t consider the potential damage this may cause – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

In order to develop a culture of Instructional Coaching, I would argue that the person being coached has to have a level of expertise that allows for them to draw on their own strategies, articulate their decision-making, critically engage with their own selves.

“Mentors assigned to ECTs to support them through their engagement with the ECF and their progress through Statutory Induction don’t have the time to fully engage in proper training and development as Instructional Coaches”

There is also the problem of time – ideally the Coach has plentiful opportunities to observe their charge in the heat of battle, allowing for that targeted feedback and development; this isn’t an option in ECT, as both teacher and Mentor have limited available time to conduct their roles – so much of mentoring in ECT is logistical and administrative, and therefore the cycle of IC is reliant on absolute honesty on the part of the ECT as they report back; even then perhaps their perception of their lesson will be flawed by the natural biases of subjectivity.

Coaching needs observed practice; back in 1982 Joyce & Showers posited that ‘coaching without the study of theory, the observation of demonstrations, and opportunities for practice with feedback will, in fact, accomplish very little; one cannot simply walk from the training session into the classroom with the skill completely ready for use; it has to be changed to fit classroom conditions…’ – there just isn’t time for this in ECT Induction.

Also, should we be using instructional coaching in a high-stakes environment with significant accountability? Ideally, notes from any coaching conversation should remain purely between coach and trainee, thus removing the fear of ‘scrutiny’; however, all ECTs are in an official Induction process consisting of observation, evidence and assessment, submitted to an external body – therefore the notes, should they be perceived as evidence, are beholden to a wider audience.

Evidence, if it must be collected, collated and curated in physical form, should only ever be indicative as opposed to exhaustive – and an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – and should be the springboard to further dialogue; do we dilute IC by using it as a tool where there is the high-stakes outcome of ‘Passing Induction’?

It is interesting to note that even Erikson cites teaching as a potentially poor vehicle for the use of Deliberate Practice, ‘simply because there are no objective criteria for superior performance’ (p.98) and that DP ‘develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established’ (p.99) – is that not the role of the Induction process?

One of the tenets of DP is the granular focus, but this just simply isn’t possible in a classroom environment where there are so many competing elements and calls on the teacher’s attention, where the simulation conditions are never the same, where the trainee or Early Career teacher is simply trying to survive – the very act of isolating a skill is hard enough, let alone devoting enough headspace to it in the heat of the moment.

With the new frameworks also come a new language, perhaps unfamiliar in its terminology to the more experienced Mentor, albeit the practice might be the same – ‘Adaptive Teaching’, anyone? In order to support the ECT within the ECF, the Mentor is facilitating a learning process for the teacher – they are helping them demonstrate competency in order to pass

Induction; they are not necessarily looking to stimulate further growth, lest their ECT suffer from the burnt wings of Icarus-esque ambition.

At the heart of it lie the Mentors themselves – classroom teachers with a willingness to share their practice; as Trevethan (2017) puts it – ‘Classroom teachers must have a clear understanding of, and commitment to, both the framework upon which the teacher education programme is built and their role, so as to enable student teachers to learn in an environment of mutual respect and emotional safety’ (p.228).

We must help them to help others by providing them with that clear understanding of the ECF and promoting further consideration of what Trevethan refers to as ‘Educative Mentoring’ – An Educative Mentor ‘establishes the prior conceptions, skills and knowledge of the student teacher and provides learning opportunities through experiences and professional conversations, which support and challenge student teachers to ask questions and grow’ (p.221).

Let’s not try to badge up Mentoring of Early Career Teachers as Instructional Coaching –it doesn’t need it and it does both approaches a disservice. Deliberate Practice is all very well, but for me it doesn’t work as a general approach in ECT.

Perhaps, to return to the start of this piece, Mentors could specialise in Instructional Coaching, but they would need a lot more practice than the ECF allows time for. For now on then, just let mentors be mentors.

“should we be using instructional coaching in a high-stakes environment with significant accountability?”

References:

Peak; Erikson Deans for Impact (2016). Practice with Purpose: The Emerging Science of Teacher Expertise. Austin, TX: Deans for Impact. Joyce, Bruce R. and Beverly Showers. “The Coaching of Teaching.” Educational Leadership 40 (1982): 4. Helen Trevethan (2017) Educative mentors? The role of classroom teachers in initial teacher education. A New Zealand study, Journal of Education for Teaching, 43:2, 219-231.

THINKING ABOUT TEACHING IN AN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL?

By Chris Woolf

Considering making a move to teaching in an international school? International Director at Wellington College, Chris Woolf, considers how to make the most of the opportunity.

On a rainy Tuesday evening in November, I clicked on the ‘international’ tab of a well-known teaching jobs website. I was drawn into a parallel world, through a portal of excitement and possibility. Without really trying, I stumbled across jobs in Costa Rica, the Falkland Islands, Dubai and Japan. I had no idea there were so many interesting opportunities in so many interesting places. It was something I couldn’t get out of my head.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was living in Beijing, taking in the Olympic Games, and visiting extraordinary parts of China and as many countries in the area as I possibly could; the beaches of Thailand, mountains of Nepal and sprawling cities of Japan. It is every bit as brilliant as that sounds. I went for 2 years, and stayed for 5. After a couple of other posts in between I’m now incredibly fortunate to be the International Director at Wellington College.

There are over 13,000 international schools around the world, hundreds more opening each year, and 750,000 staff already working in international schools. It is amazing to consider the choices available.

But how could you possibly decide where to apply? And what would you need if you did want to make a move?

There are some amazing international schools out there, with stunning facilities

and utterly beautiful campuses. Working at them does feel like a genuine privilege. But there are also some underwhelming ones, where things sometimes go awry, and you can feel a long way from home if problems arise. How do you make sure you end up in the first group, and not the second?

The first tip is to look at the school’s accreditations. Just as you might look at a school’s Ofsted report in the UK, knowing if the school is accredited by any of the major international educational organisations is a good start. Good ones to look out for are CIS and COBIS. NEASC and WASC are US organisations that do a similar thing, and there are Australian and other equivalent groups too. But generally, knowing someone else has visited the school and given it a seal of approval is a good thing.

Thinking of the different national accreditations, you’ll want to know the curriculum the school offers as well. As a UK teacher your expertise with the National Curriculum or GCSEs means you will be in particular demand in schools that offer this. Of course, a good teacher is good at what they do regardless of the curriculum, but you may feel less comfortable delivering an unfamiliar curriculum and assessing in different ways while you are finding your feet in a brand new place.

The growth of school groups is another point to consider. Groups can be good,

so you can connect and collaborate with other teachers who might find themselves in a similar situation to yours. With so many new schools opening, joining a new school that is part of a group reduces the risk you might otherwise associate with a start-up.

School groups like Wellington College have grown so effectively as there is a blueprint for their success and support from the founding school in the UK. Wellington adds 7 to the 13,000 international schools around the world and the eighth one opens in Pune, India in September.

Each of ours is subject to an annual review from the school in the UK. This means you can be confident in the quality of the school you might like to join. We look at all the things you would expect: vision, values, curriculum, teaching and learning, leadership and management. But the word ‘review’ is deliberately not the same as ‘inspection’. This is about school development and continual improvement, not judgement.

Our schools all have governor representatives from Wellington College International which ensures strategic connections are strong. Exchanges of students and staff, and training linking the schools together are further signs that can give you confidence. Continuing professional development is another distinguishing feature some school groups

can maximise. We are partners with our local teaching school alliance to deliver the NPQ qualifications, so that teachers can continue to develop really well in a way that is recognisable when they return to the UK from a top international school.

Plenty of UK schools have started schools in different parts of the world, and it is important to find out how much genuine collaboration there is between them before you make any decisions. The authenticity of the connection is variable, and a good thing to see if you can find out more about.

Just as you would in the UK, you should look at the values of the school. As they are trying to make themselves distinctive in some competitive markets? Some of the best schools in the world can articulate their values in just a few words.

You might want to know if the school is not for profit, or very much the opposite. In many cases, the fees for students to join the school can be considerable, so many schools approach this with the stated intention to contribute positively to the local community around the school. Ask more about how the school supports those around it to see if the values of the school are put visibly into practice.

Another way of seeing this is in the support for new colleagues to join the school. Most schools will understand a first international school post is a big step for most people and do what they can to

make this as straightforward as possible. You should expect help with your visa, and advice on flights.

Good schools will make sure you are collected at the airport, they may stock the fridge in your apartment when you arrive, which they will provide, and generally help you settle in.

At the start of your career you were probably prepped to ask in an interview about the NQT or ECT induction process in your school. This type of induction is slightly different, but tells you a great deal about the approach the school takes to looking after their staff.

For international schools recruitment starts early, as teachers usually have to indicate early in the first term of the year if they will renew their contracts. Contracts are typically two to three years, so recruitment is a major part of an international school leader’s time. If school leaders are returning to the UK to recruit face to face, they will want to make the most of their time away from their school and appoint as many posts as possible. For this reason, don’t be overly concerned if a school seems to be advertising multiple posts at the same time. You’ll be able to see quite quickly how big the staff team is, and what proportion seem to be leaving.

So if there is an interesting post in a part of the world that takes your fancy, what would you need to consider to maximise

your chances of landing the job?

You’ll want to differentiate yourself from the TEFL wielding back packer as the highly trained and sought-after teacher that you are. In a new role there will be less need for crowd control and more requirement for your subject expertise. Personalised learning matters, challenging the more able and supporting all students is important, as it is in all schools. Your ability to show this, and your commitment to continuing professional development will all be relevant.

The extra-curricular life of the school is a big part of international school education. Talking about what you have already done in this area will certainly matter. Competition to work in the best schools is considerable, and your sensitive cultural understanding of your host country will also be a factor to consider.

You’ll want to make your own decision about countries, cities and cultures. Some locations are seen as more ‘family friendly’ than others, but that does depend on the family! Pack light, you are bound to bring back more than you took out.

The only essential is your sense of adventure. Bon voyage!

CraCking The

TeaCher-Ta relaTionship

By Emily Weston

Teaching assistants make such a difference to the learning that occurs in your classroom. But what can you do to develop and enhance that Teacher-TA relationship to make an even greater difference? Emily Weston explains…

If I ask you, ‘what is a teacher’s best friend?’, what would your answer be? Glue sticks? Your classroom snack box? Or your teaching assistant?

For me, having a TA in my classroom is one of the best parts of the job, and I believe it should be for you, too. Not only do they provide invaluable help with increasing progress for your class, but they can be a listening ear when you have a bad day, or someone to sound your new ideas too. However, I often think the success of the teacher and TA relationship can depend on which letter of the acronym you put the emphasis on: the T, or the A.

On one hand, a much smaller hand, you have those who treat their TA like an assistant. Despite them being in the classroom to provide support, this is not personal to the teacher. Giving your TA demands and delegating the jobs that you don’t want to do can often deteriorate the relationship and make them feel undervalued.

Of course, from time-to-time we all ask our TA to cover while we pop to the toilet, or

print those last SATs papers you ran out of time to do on your PPA. Occasionally, I will even ask mine to make me a drink. But, and this is the important part, the relationship must already have been built with your TA by this time.

A more successful TA relationship is built when they are doing just that: teaching Often, they will have a range of skills which will complement your own and should be utilised within the classroom. For example, in my time as a teacher I’ve had:

• TAs who have creative ideas and more artistic tendencies than mewhich means amazing displays!

• TAs who have specialisms in subjects I don’t - RE, MFL or Art. This means they can give high-quality foundation sessions either during my PPA, or while I do short interventions.

• TAs who have an interest in pastoral care, which enhances provision in the classroom.

These are skills I don’t always have. Often, especially in Primary, we can become a jack of all trades, master of...a few. I know my own strengths and weaknesses, so I am always thrilled when my TA has skills which enhance my own! Because of this, whenever I start teaching alongside a new TA, I like to ask what their interests are, both in and outside of the classroom, to see if we can incorporate these into our curriculum.

I also like to do this because I enjoy the flexibility of a TA being able to manage flexible interventions or cover whole class teaching - once children are on task - while I do the interventions. This works best when you’re sure of what your TA feels comfortable teaching. For example, with some Maths topics this year, my TA preferred to work with children in the classroom once they were on task, while I did the flexible intervention with children who felt they needed additional help. Other times, she was confident to do the intervention herself, while I stayed in class.

“I enjoy the flexibility of a TA being able to manage flexible interventions or cover whole class teaching - once children are on task - while I do the interventions.”

I wanted you to not just have my word for it, so here is my previous TA, Danni Bryan, explaining her perspective on her role in the classroom:

What I love about being a TA is that no two days are the same. Beyond anything else, t’s taught me to be flexible and to adapt quickly! The best part of the role is, of course, working with the children. I enjoy the moment a child works out the solution to a question they find tricky and the look on their faces when I tell them I’m proud of them for the determination and resilience they have shown to get there.

To be a good TA, having a good relationship with the teacher is everything. It shows well in the classroom if the adults can interact and work well together; the children are calmer and it’s a happier environment for everyone. It also models good relationships well to children, too.

Being a TA comes with challenges just like every other job, but knowing you’re making a difference in a child’s life is everything and more.

Your relationship should enable the children to be put first, always

With this in mind, here are my top tips for working e ectively together through the year:

1. Find out what each other’s strengths and weaknesses are. If you are both aware of this through the year it is even easier to o er additional support where it is needed, and more likely to be wanted.

2. Don’t let your mood a ect your relationship. We all have up and down days - try not to let these a ect how you speak to each other. Sounds so simple, but when you spend so much time together, it can be harder than you think! Take the time to ask if they’re okay

3. Make each other drinks. The little gestures can make such a di erence to the wellbeing of sta , and you are best placed to look out for each other.

4. Leave a note to start the morning - even if you have time to talk, it’s always useful to have the day outlined with clear instructions.

5. Keep an intervention folder - a paper one! - where short notes of children and groups which have been taken can instantly be seen. Yes, online is great but sometimes a quick look in a folder that is to hand can be invaluable. It also shows assessments made by both of you.

By doing this, you are developing a partnership that will create a happy and stimulating work environment not only for you, as adults, but for the children. This relationship goes beyond imparting academic wisdom with the children; we model how to support others, work together and compromise. Children (as we all know) pick up on everything so they’ll notice an imbalance in the classroom.

There’s a saying I am sure we all know that I am guilty of using a lot (maybe even too much!): ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’. It’s well known because it’s true.

“To be a good TA, having a good relationship with the teacher is everything.”

LEADERSHIP

24.

Top Tips For New Heads of Department

Ex-military and now Assistant Headteachers, Will and George offer the advice they wished they’d been given before they took up their previous Head of Department roles.

Top Tips For New Heads oF deparTmeNTs

Being promoted to a Head of Department role is an exciting but daunting challenge. There are aspects of the role that you can’t really understand until you’re doing them, but some tips to guide you are always useful. Will and George offer the advice they wished they’d been given before they took up their own Head of Department roles.

By Will Pope and George Vlachonikolis

Will and George met each other more than 17 years ago in the same training platoon in the British Army. They served together on operations in Afghanistan in 2010/11 and both left the Army shortly after to become teachers and then Heads of Department. In 2022, they both moved into new Assistant Headteacher roles at their respective schools.

advice would

Will:

George and I met up recently and we realised that we had spent a combined ten years as Heads of Department. So, of course, we started to compare notes.

George:

It’s always interesting to listen to someone else who has been in the same role as you. Will and I might teach different subjects but we found that there was plenty of cross-over being a HOD - both good and bad.

Will:

We both enjoyed the role. But, even for us ex-military officers, there were still some difficult challenges along the way. HODs are in the firing line for a lot of things. For example, we’re accountable for results, we’re still teaching full timetables and, when Senior Leaders are dreaming up new initiatives, it will usually fall on HODs’ shoulders to execute them (the initiatives, that is). Therefore, we thought it might be useful to compile a list of the tips we wish we had been more aware of when we started in this brilliant role. So, here goes:

1. Pause, Slow Down

Will:

We all want to create a great first impression. But, it’s important not to over-promise and under-deliver. Every new initiative needs resourcing and yet resources are scarce. Take a moment to consider the capacity of the staff in your department, who are already likely to be extremely busy with their schedules of

lessons, duties and other commitments. Does anyone actually have any free time after school to run your new ‘Astronomy club’? Is the benefit of the club really worth the potential burnout of a busy member of your team?

The same goes for students too. Remember, they’ve probably had a music lesson, an orchestra rehearsal and two sports practices already this week before you’ve come along and added in a lunchtime revision class. I’m not saying you shouldn’t come up with any new initiatives, but I am saying that you can’t and shouldn’t try to do it all. Pick one or two and just do them brilliantly.

George:

Time is everyone’s biggest enemy at school. As a HOD, it’s important to recognise that you are not the only demand on your teachers’ time. Meetings are an obvious example for me. If you don’t need to have a meeting then don’t have one ‘just because’. There’s nothing worse than feeling like your boss doesn’t respect your valuable time. You can lose a lot of goodwill that way.

What

they give to a new Head of Department?

2. Get organised. Share resources.

Will:

I spent a lot of time in my first month reorganising the departmental resources. It was one of the best decisions I made. I completely restructured the shared folder and Firefly site, scanning reams of paper resources and creating a genuinely useful lesson bank from the vortex it had previously been. I think this gave everyone in the department a greater sense of security because they always knew there was a lesson they could grab at the last minute if they had to.

But it also did something else as well: we all became a bit more proactive in sharing new resources. This was great in terms of spreading good practice and providing a great starting point for new staff joining the department.

George:

My view is that, as a HOD, you are 100%

LEADERSHIP

responsible for making sure every member of the department has the resources they need to teach their section of the course. Ultimately, that’s an accountability issue. If the teachers ‘under your command’ weren’t able to teach to the best of their ability because you didn’t help them create resources, share your own or you just didn’t use your budget to buy some ‘off-the-shelf’ ones then that’s on you.

3. Build culture.

Will:

My Upper 6th leavers continually tell me that their most memorable experiences in Physics have either been the experiments where I’ve nearly hurt myself, or the trips to hear people other than me speak.

Our local university and associated professional institutes have all been instrumental in helping us build and develop a culture of academic curiosity in our subjects. A minibus after school,

a packed dinner and a free seat in a university lecture theatre is a cheap and easy trip to orchestrate, especially when it is a repeating series of lectures. The pupils get a huge sense of pride in regularly attending and building their knowledge beyond the curriculum.

George:

Extra-curricular stuff Is great but culture begins in the classroom and the everyday interaction between teacher and student. Everything you do either moves your students closer towards or further away from your desired endstate. One metric that I judged myself on was whether my Upper 6th leavers reported that they enjoyed Economics more than other subjects. Did they want to come to our classes? Were they interested in the things that we were teaching them? If your students like your subject more than others, a lot of what Will is talking about – students going the extra mile outside of class will happen naturally.

4. Look Forward. Forewarned is forearmed.

George:

HODs are the engine room of the school. You have a permanently full inbox and people are looking at you for direction. To that end, you must ensure your calendar admin is impeccable. Similarly, keep your staff informed and reminded because, ultimately, If your staff miss deadlines then that’s a reflection on you. My ‘comms system’ certainly isn’t perfect but I try to make sure there are effective channels for information flows.

I used to physically sit next to people in my department, we had a Whatsapp chat and, of course, email. I frequently cc’d my staff into emails that weren’t addressed to them but that I felt they should be aware of.

Will:

I would echo George’s comments here. I send out a departmental email every Friday with a breakdown of the peculiarities of the week ahead and a longer-term forecast. I found that this method of multiple, procedural reminders of an approaching deadline meant that colleagues very quickly improved their reliability and were less likely to miss deadlines.

5. Difficult conversations.

George:

I’m a big believer that your department can only ever be as good as the teachers alongside you. So, it’s important to look after them. One way to think about that is you should be a filter, not a funnel, for the hundreds of tasks that inevitably roll downhill from senior leaders.

But, once in a while, you might come to the conclusion that a particular teacher simply cannot deliver what you and the school want. That is the hardest part of the job. I could tell you a lot of things about collecting evidence, setting agreed targets (with deadlines) and being specific in your instruction – but, the truth is, if this might be you, then get some advice from HR and senior managers quickly. Work with them and get some training in having difficult conversations.

Will:

Those conversations are dreadful. That said, I have found that colleagues will usually know if they have fallen short. Therefore, a well-placed question can often get them to break the ice and identify the problem themselves. At that stage, you can both begin to look forward and plan a solution. This can turn the conversation into a much more positive experience. Whatever happens, make sure the conversation is planned so it’s in a neutral space (not your office), has time allocated, and you won’t be disturbed. If your colleague feels they are being ambushed, it immediately sets things on a bad trajectory.

6. Manage up

George:

We all hate being micro-managed so be your boss’s easiest line management meeting of the week. Anticipate her questions, have the answers ready to go. You should highlight the problems and come armed with solutions. If you do this, you’re far more likely to get what you want and you’ll start to shape the department in the way in which you want (not someone else’s vision).

Will:

Perhaps it is just physicist in me, but I think that presenting information and data to your managers is going to be much more welcome if it is clear, simple and easy to digest. Once you have spent hours compiling your data, an extra five minutes putting it into a graph and making it visually appealing is an obvious final step to present your argument. I would also say that, as well as the Senior Leadership Team, fostering strong relationships with those other teams in the school who will help you improve your department is crucial – the catering, estates, IT, transport, grounds, medical, administrative and bursary departments will all have amazing skills that will make your life much easier. Keep them onside.

Success isn’t guaranteed. Whether you inherit a well-oiled machine or what feels like a rust bucket on its last legs, we hope these pointers may help ease your transition into this new role.

Our motto when training at Sandhurst was “Serve to Lead” and both of us have found that it served us pretty well as both soldiers and teachers. If you were to use those three words as your overarching principle in the decisions you make, you won’t go far wrong. Good luck.

PEDAGOGY

30.

Cognitive Science As A Framework For Organising Great Teaching

Isaac Moore takes us through the principles of cognitive science that underpin highly-effective teaching strategies.

36.

The Case For Adaptive Quizzing In Assessment

How well do we adapt our questions when assessing our students after the delivery of the information we have taught?

41. Knowledge Organisers: Research and Implementation Why are knowledge organisers so powerful as tools for teaching and retrieval?

47. Using Habits Of Discussion To Enhance Oracy

Darren Leslie offers tactical advice on how to improve the quality of your in-class discussions.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AS A FRAMEWORK FOR ORGANISING GREAT TEACHING

To teach well, it makes sense that teachers understand how the brain, or more specifically “memory”, works. Isaac Moore takes us through the principles of cognitive science that un-derpin highlye ective teaching strategies.

By Isaac Moore

Cognitive science has given us a model, a framework to understand how learning happens. Our understanding of how learning happens is often represented using the model below:

This illustration of how we learn, by Tom Sherrington (original model is in Why Don’t Students Like School by Daniel Willingham), shows that there are three components to how learning happens:

• WORKING MEMORY:

• ATTENTION:

The gateway of information from the environment to our working memory. The environment is full of both useful and unhelpful signals to students when we teach. An environment that is full of useful information (a classroom where there is no disruption and a corridor that is calm and orderly) is supportive of good teaching and learning, which is the core business of any school. This is the first key aspect of great teaching and school improvement.

Our working memory is where we make sense of information, where we make meaning, where thinking takes place. Our working memory has a flow of information from both the environment and our long term memory, if there is prior knowledge stored in it and retrievable. Making sense of new information from the environment requires knowledge stored in our long term memory. The capacity of our working memory is limited when trying to make sense of new information if there is no prior knowledge to activate.

• LONG TERM MEMORY (LTM):

Long Term Memory is where knowledge is stored and retrieved from. Its storage capacity is

unlimited. LTM is commonly divided into explicit (declarative) and implicit (nondeclarative) memory [Schacter & Tulving, 1994]. Explicit memory can be further subdivided: episodic memory refers to personal events that are associated with specific times and locations, whereas semantic memory corresponds to general facts and knowledge about the world. Implicit memory, on the other hand, encompasses e ects of prior experience that are often not available to consciousness, such as priming, habits, and skills.

This model from cognitive science has some implications for how we teach and how school leaders go about improving schools. I have organised some of these implications under the following four principles;

PRINCIPLE 1: WHAT WE KNOW DETERMINES WHAT WE LEARN AND HOW QUICKLY WE LEARN

The ‘Matthew E ect’ applies here- As explained above, meaning making happens when in-formation garnered through paying attention and knowledge from the LTM (prior knowledge) combine in our working memory. The network of knowledge in our LTM makes it possible to make sense of new information quickly and durably.

Our students that have prior knowledge to bring to lessons end up having more knowledge, those without prior knowledge struggle to learn new things. The students that struggle to know because they lack prior knowledge may become demotivated and give up on learning.

What are the implications of this principle for how we teach and improve our schools?

E ective sequencing in SoL: This is essential to ensuring that students have the prior knowledge they need for upcoming lessons. How do you know when your curriculum has been e ectively sequenced? There are no hard and fast rules but there are a few things you can do and some questions you can ask to continue to improve your sequencing of knowledge and skills in your subject. Some of these include:

1. What is the purpose of my subject curriculum?

2. What are the knowledge/skill endpoints that we want to teach to all students in my subject?

3. What knowledge do students need to have to reach each endpoint?

4. What knowledge should precede what knowledge when we teach?

5. How are we going to know when students have learned the knowledge and skills we have sequenced?

6. How should we teach to ensure all students learn the curriculum?

7. What should we do when they have not learned the curriculum?

There are more questions you can ask, for example, what do others in my subject associa-tion consider to be an e ective sequence?, how is the prior knowledge from primary reflect-ing in the sequence from some of the best schools?, Does this sequence work in my con-text?

The questions above are helpful when sequencing your curriculum. When your curriculum is e ectively sequenced, it becomes the progression model. Care must be taken to ensure that how we teach and assess do not render the curriculum ine ective. Making the curriculum the progression model means you are constantly asking questions and using the most e ective pedagogy when you teach. It means CPD in subject teams to up-skill everyone so as to safeguard the educational entitlement of all students, especially SEND and disadvantaged students.

Durable knowledge storage and retrieval

In A new theory of disuse and an old theory of stimulus fluctuation, [Bjork & Bjork, 1992] take the starting point that any item of information may eventually become unrecallable, regard-less of how accessible and overlearned it may be at a point in time. This means that the knowledge we teach our students becomes unrecallable over a period of time, no matter

how well-learned it was at a point in the past. This a ects what prior knowledge students are able to take with them to lessons. Bjork also argued that it is simply a mistake to think that when we fail to retrieve information, that this is a failure of our memory system. We all know about students that think there is something wrong with their memory simply because they failed to recall something that they had encountered before.

In their new theory, Bjork et al proposed the following five assumptions;

1. An item in memory has two strengths- storage and retrieval strengths. Storage strength measures how well learned knowledge is and retrieval strength measures the current ease of access to the knowledge in our memory.

2. The storage strength of a knowledge item grows as a pure accumulation process, as a function of opportunities to study or recall the knowledge item.

3. There is no limit on storage capacity, but there is a limit on retrieval capacity

4. Retrieving knowledge from memory and studying both increase the retrieval strength of a knowledge item, as well as its storage strength but retrieval is the more potent outcome.

5. The retrieval of an item from memory decreases owing to the learning or retrieval of other items.

What does this all mean for the prior knowledge of our students and teaching?

Retrieval strength is measured by current performance like answering questions in lessons and in a test. Storage strength is the degree to

which memory representations (i.e., knowledge and procedures) are integrated with other memory representations. This can not be directly measured but we can know if storage strength is increasing by asking how easy it is to retrieve knowledge in the future and when we relearn something we forgot, how quick it is to relearn it.

The ultimate goal for all teachers is to reduce retrieval strength for our students and increase storage strength- this is what learning is about. When retrieval strength is

high, regardless of storage strength, not a lot of learning is taking place. When retrieval strength is low (not able to retrieve at that point in time), our students make the greatest gain in learning. It turns out that forgetting is actually good for learning.

The testing e ect is a way to improve storage strength. Retrieving knowledge from our LTM improves storage strength even when we fail, for as long there is an opportunity for feed-back. The spacing e ect is another way

to boost the storage strength of our students.

When we combine both the testing e ect and the spacing e ect, we maximise the gains from these two e ects. All teachers should have the spaced testing e ect planned into their curriculums. How the testing e ect works varies for subjects, so be careful and take the time to find out how to make this e ective for your subject.

PRINCIPLE 2: WE LEARN ONLY WHEN WE THINK, WHEN WE THINK HARD

A calm and quiet environment

The model of how we learn that has been adapted from Daniel Willingham’s book shows the importance of attention to thinking and learning. We think about what we pay attention to. Inattention to the core purpose of the classroom is costly. When the environment is noisy and chaotic, all students miss out of learning, but SEND students tend to miss out more. Good schools close the gap for SEND students and disadvantaged students by ensuring the learning environment is calm and orderly. The learning environment is not just the classroom, it includes the corridors and every part of the premises. The responsibility for a calm and orderly environment lies with SLT.

Whatever the behaviour ideology of the headteacher of a school, if the environment is not calm and orderly, if the behaviour of some students make the environment chaotic and un-safe for the students that are most in need of a calm and safe environment, then that is clearly a failure of leadership. Do you believe in restorative practice? Does the implementa-tion cause the school to become disorderly? Is a minority of students making learning di cult for others? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then that is a clear failure of leadership.

Routines to focus attention

Having a calm and orderly environment and classroom is not enough for all students to learn and thrive in school. We need to have routines that all teachers and students know and un-derstand. When routines become habits, we

expend less cognitive resources on remember-ing and doing them. This is especially important for some SEND students and students that have had their working memory impaired by hardship. The routines need to be simple to fol-low and be explicitly taught. Corridor routines to keep everyone safe and get everyone to lesson on time and classroom routines to inject some e ciency into what we do need to be taught by all to all.

Thinking and participation ratio

The goal of every lesson is learning, but learning only happens when students think and think hard. We don’t want just a few students to think hard, we want all students

to think hard. Doug Lemov first coined the term ratio in Teach Like A Champion 2.0 . Adam Boxer wrote an excellent blog on ratio and ways to increase both thinking and participation ratio. It means There are 2 types of ratio- Participation ratio concerns how many students are participating in an activity (mental or physical) and how often and thinking ratio concerns how hard students are thinking when they participate.

How can a class teacher increase thinking and participation ratio? The most e ective way I have found is through the use of mini whiteboards. Other strategies include Wait Time, Cold Call and independent practice in lessons.

PRINCIPLE 3: OUR WORKING MEMORY IS LIMITED WHEN WE LEARN SOMETHING NEW

Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction places the teacher at the centre of teaching as the knowledge expert. The class teacher gives guided instructions to all students from the front of the classroom. It is highly structured and engaging (not boring at all). In explicit instruction teaching, students are novices and the teacher is the expert. The teacher breaks down the knowledge to be taught sequentially, with lots of guided practice. Teachers typically use worked examples to model what to do and how to do it and gradually release responsibility to students so that they can engage in independent practice. Terms like I do-We do-You do and faded guidance are associated with explicit teaching.

Materials designed with cognitive load in mind

The resources and materials we use in lessons should be designed with cognitive load in mind. Powerpoint slides with lots of texts are unlikely to help all students. Slides of a few carefully selected texts would be better. Better still, a diagram/ image on a slide and words from the teacher that explain the idea that the image represents is even better. Nothing beats drawing live (if you can) and explaining at the same time.

PRINCIPLE 4: FLUENCY ARISES THROUGH FLUENCY OVER TIME

There needs to be variation to the questions that students practise with. Have you ever been told by students that you did not teach them something, even though you did? Sometimes, the questions we give to students to practise on are so narrow that students struggle to gen-eralise their understanding. Variation theory is an excellent teaching method to help solve this problem. It is primarily used in Maths, but it can be used in any subject to design the questions we give to students. More about it here

Teach students about effective learning strategies

in lessons and at home

SLOP (Shed load of practice)

For students to develop fluency, they need to do a shedload of practice in lessons and at home. Independent practice sessions in lessons increase participation ratio, they also help students to use knowledge fluently. The questions should allow all students to start with min-imal guidance but the challenge should be ramped up. A lot of schools and subjects now use booklets for this purpose.

The work of Dunlosky [Dunlosky, 1993] is very important here. Many students revise, but a lot of students tend to choose strategies that are ine ective because such strategies make the revision material seem familiar. Students will choose reading/rereading their notes/ highlighting notes over using the testing e ect. Why? Because they find the testing e ect less familiar and e ortful. Students tend to choose mass practice over using the spac-ing e ect. Why? Because the spacing e ect is e ortful.

Teachers therefore need to teach students about the learning strategies that are e ective and support students to use these strategies at home. The teaching needs to be explicit- teacher models how to make a revision plan using spaced retrieval; teacher supports students to make the next revision plan; students make revision plans independently.

THE CASE FOR ADAPTIVE QUIZZING IN ASSESSMENT

As teachers, we know all too well how valuable good questioning in the classroom is, when teaching new information to students. We adapt our questions well to draw the right information out from students during the “delivery” part of teaching. But how well do we adapt our questions when assessing our students after the delivery? Kristian Still argues the case for adaptive quizzing in his latest piece for HWRK Magazine.

By Kristian Still

At the beginning of the summer, I stumbled upon the work of Dr Svenja Heitmann. Three papers in fact. In this series, Heitmann et al. (2018, 2021, 2022) investigated two mechanisms to ‘optimise’ practice quizzing when compared to notetaking, starting o in the laboratory and moving to the lecture hall with a field experiment with 155 undergraduate pre-service teachers at Bielefeld University.

Dr Heitmann and her colleagues focused their attention on the adaptive (personalisation) mechanisms. Two adaption models were investigated in the laboratory: performance-based and cognitive demand-based.

In the performance-based approach, performance on quiz questions was used as an indicator of retrieval success. In the cognitive demand-based approach,

“perceived cognitive demand” when answering the quiz questions was used to indicate retrieval-e ort (Heitmann et al., 2022), in other words, how hard the questions were to answer.

Both models led to performance benefits. Personalising the adaptive quizzing, using perceived cognitive demand-based adaptations “substantially increased the quizzing e ect” (Heitmann et al., 2018: 10). This mechanism was then applied in the field study.

The field study results led Heitmann et al. (2021: 603) to conclude that the benefits of practice quizzing “in authentic learning contexts are even greater when the quiz questions are adapted to learners’ state of knowledge”.

In addition to improved test

performance on familiar questions, their research also provided further evidence for knowledge transfer, suggesting that practice quizzing is a suitable tool to foster meaningful learning.

As for learner achievement motivations (much like a character trait), quizzing benefits were moderated by ‘hope of success’ scores but not ‘fear of failure’ scores.

Their conclusion is clear in the title of the 2018 paper – “Testing Is More Desirable When It Is Adaptive and Still Desirable When Compared to Note-Taking.”

Hardly groundbreaking. But give me a moment -- the benefits of testing led learners to achieve a higher test performance and, interestingly, “lower perceived cognitive demand during testing.”

WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY MEAN AND WHY MIGHT IT INTEREST TEACHERS?

The inference is, that in addition to knowing more, quizzing (retrieval practice) frees up cognitive capacity or thinking space. As Dr Heitmann commented:

‘The post-test performance was better because their mental resources weren’t as exhausted in the learning phase.’ Dr. Svenja Heitmann

The students’ ‘mental resources were less exhausted due to the adaptation of the test questions to their level of knowledge’. As a result the students ‘profited from the freed-up capacity for the execution of beneficial learning processes.’ In simple terms, students had more resources left

for processes that are beneficial for learning.

So, what can teachers take from Dr Heitmann’s research?

First, the benefits of quizzing over note-taking. Hopefully, you knew that already.

Second, the more a student knows going into an exam, the more cognitive capacity they will have to attend to the mechanics of that exam. Importantly, that is not exclusive to adaptive testing. Quizzing of any sort, ahead of exams, helps free up cognitive capacity, which could be allocated to attending to the mechanics of the exam. That can only be a good thing right?

Third, perceived cognitive demandbased ratings, how di cult pupils find questions rather than how

many marks they were awarded, might be a more useful measure for personalisation and whether a pupil should relearn or revise a topic area. If nothing else, it is a simple indicator to collect and consider alongside question outcomes.

WHAT MIGHT THIS LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?

End-of-term assessments provide excellent opportunities to explore the ‘perceived cognitive demand’ of the questions you set. First, very high ratings for perceived cognitive load would indicate that learners have not yet acquired the knowledge necessary to master a question. They might benefit more from quiz questions of lower complexity. Similarly, very low cognitive load ratings would indicate that learners have already

“Without question, the most e cient schedule [for spaced learning] is an adaptive one, accounting for the learner’s rates of forgetting and prior knowledge”. (Latimier et al., 2021: 980).

acquired the knowledge necessary to master a question and might benefit more from quiz questions of higher complexity.

However, Wisely, Heitmann et al., (2022) advise caution with any metacognitive judgement, due to the common biases and heuristics of learners’ self-assessment. A simple rating scale next to the question would su ce in this case.

I would also add my position, that any assessment with metacognitive judgements (be that confidence or perceived cognitive load), with feedback, promotes metacognitive accuracy. And metacognitive accuracy brings with it a crucial academic advantage.

Now, with these two pieces of data (the rating and the question outcome), there is plenty to discuss with your pupils. First the perceived cognitive load ratings and second the di erence between the rating and the performance.

DO WE HAVE TO USE SOFTWARE FOR ADAPTIVE QUIZZING?

There are plenty of digital platforms on the market using phrases like AI, or adaptive, personalisation. However it does not have to be so. As Dr Heitmann implored:

“Adaptive quizzing could just as easily be done with di erent folders containing di erently di cult questions… and then the students use some kind of rating scale (maybe even smiley faces for the young students) to then choose the folder their next question would be coming from. There is still a whole lot of paper pencil schooling going on out there - and adaptive quizzing is available there too.”

I asked Dr Heitmann her professional thoughts on the benefits of needing to make the perceived cognitive demand. Are the performance gains part-memorial and partmetacognitive?

“It’s not all about reflecting, I think that’s more of a nice side e ect (to strengthen metacognition as you wrote). The adaptation is more focused on providing students with fitting questions when you do not have the resources to sit down with every single student to adapt the di culty yourself according to your personal assessment that’s based on your interaction with that student... because no teacher teaching in regular schools has those resources!”

WHY HAS ADAPTIVE QUIZZING STAYED IN THE SHADOWS?

Dr Heitmann argues, “What’s been missing is informed teachers in classrooms, teaching with adaptive quizzing and teachers with a broader audience who can make adaptive quizzing better known. Teachers need to know that it’s a good idea to adapt questions.”

Our thanks to Dr Svenja Heitmann.

References:

Heitmann, S., Grund, A., Berthold, K., Fries, S., & Roelle, J. (2018). Testing is more desirable when it is adaptive and still desirable when compared to note-taking. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02596. Article 2596.

Heitmann, S., Obergassel, N., Fries, S., Grund, A., Berthold, K. and Roelle, J. (2021) Adaptive practice quizzing in a university lecture: a pre-registered field experiment. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 10(4), 603–620. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0101865

Heitmann, S., Grund, A., Fries, S., Berthold, K., & Roelle, J. (2022). The quizzing e ect depends on hope of success and can be optimized by cognitive load-based adaptation. Learning and Instruction, 77, 101526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2021.101526

Latimier, A., Peyre, H. and Ramus, F. (2021) A meta-analytic review of the benefit of spacing out retrieval practice episodes on retention. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 959–987. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09572-8

KNOWLEDGE ORGANISERS: RESEARCH & IMPLEMENTATION

This is the first of two articles around the subject of knowledge organisers in the classroom. In this first article, I discuss the research behind memory and retaining information, giving rise to the benefits of knowledge organisers as a form of retrieval practice before discussing how they have been implemented in my school.

By Adam Woodward

“Memory is the residue of thought”

In recent years, knowledge organisers have been the subject of many conversations around the subject of retrieval practice and its implementation both in primary and secondary schools. The term was first coined by Joe Kirby in 2015 as “the most awesome tool in the arsenal of the curriculum designer... These organise all the most vital, useful and powerful knowledge on a singular page.” This focus was primarily based around their inclusion for secondary students as a form of independent study and revision for GCSE and A-Level students. but the conversation since then has also been as to whether they could be implemented in the primary setting.

Kirby also goes on to explain how, when a new teacher starts in a school, one of the first questions they have is ‘what do I teach?’ At a glance, knowledge organisers

answer that. Everything pupils (and teachers) need to know is set out clearly in advance – like any well thought out curriculum should be.

Based on this, teachers, including myself, have seen a great benefit to both teachers and pupils alike in primary and I have spent the past two years (since the first lockdown) creating my own, based on the thoughts of Kirby, Jon Hutchinson and Kate Jones as to how they can be most e ective in the primary classroom.

The introduction of these in my setting has been gradual, focusing on History and Geography initially and focuses the attention of key dates, key events, important individuals and the links to prior learning. It is then my job to create these for my class teachers.

However, to understand the benefits of knowledge organisers as a form of retrieval practice in the primary classroom, it is important to think about the research behind how we retain information.

Daniel Willingham, in Why Don’t Students Like School? said that “Memory is the residue of thought” and this quote has been used worldwide when discussing cognitive science and memory. So what makes something stick in your memory, and what is likely to slip away?

Willingham states that one important element to consider is the environment where learning is taking place and the attention paid by the student as teaching is taking place and it was here that the memory model was born and has since been replicated by Oliver Caviglioli as seen here:

This understanding of memory and the environment where teaching is taking place provides us with an understanding of a need to make sure that teaching is focused on what needs to be learned. An example of such is the teaching about Stonehenge by building it out of custard creams. Reader, I can see your eyes rolling into the back of your heads as the mere thought of this idea. Yes, it sounds lovely and the children will have a great time taking part in such a fun activity. However, what they will remember is that they used custard creams to build Stonehenge. What they don’t remember is that Stonehenge was built in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods; that the top stones on each arch are called lintel stones and that the standing stones are called sarsen stones, and this is where knowledge organisers can play a key part.

Bjork (2012) states that “using your memory, shapes your memory”, and Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve of 1885 shows a key link to the benefits of retrieval practice when looking to use and shape said memory.

Agarwal (2021) defined retrieval practice as “…the act of recalling previously learned information— improving long-term learning and memory.” Retrieval practice – such as the use of knowledge or-ganisers as one example of this - enables taught information to become embedded, and therefore learned information, over time.

Our working memory is very limited, so it is naïve to think that everything that we ‘teach’ our stu-dents will stick. This is made even more di cult for those children who have a more limited working memory than others. Through rehearsal and retrieval, more information can be stored in the long-term memory. However, this information is not immune to being forgotten and by revisiting this knowledge through retrieval practice, it is easier to bring this knowledge back from the longterm memory to the working memory.

Kate Jones (2019) states that “as educators, our role isn’t to simply transfer information to students’

long-term memory, we also need to support them so that they can retrieve that information when required.”

I am not the first teacher to have thought about the use of knowledge organisers in the primary classroom. One pioneer of this was Jon Hutchinson. He explained how a well-planned curriculum (and the use of knowledge organisers within this curriculum) meant that teachers thought carefully about what they wanted children to know at the end of a topic, as opposed to what activities they wanted to fill lessons with.

I really enjoyed the example that he gave at the end of a Stone Age unit covered with Year 3. His children took part in many ‘fun’ activities including building neolithic roundhouses out of card and straw; learning a stone age song and creating stone age jewellery using beads and string to name a few. Hutchinson explained how the children loved it.

The problem was though that none of the children knew what ‘neolithic’ meant. So much time had been spent on creating fun activities for the children to complete with links to the unit, that all the children remembered was completing these activities and not the learning behind them. What is important is finding a fine balance between the two –ensuring that learning is taking place but in a way that is in context for children to use and apply.

This is where knowledge organisers have a place – providing children with the key knowledge behind a unit – for example, what the term neolithic means – and referring to that within learning for this to be remembered.

As stated by Hutchinson, knowledge organisers should be a planning, teaching and assessment guide for teachers as well as pupils and parents. This does require teachers to ‘teach’ pupils how to make the most of these and the consistent referral to the knowledge included within them will help to achieve that. It is not enough to just stick them into books and hope that, by the power of osmosis, the appropriate knowledge will be acquired.

Opportunities to assess that learning has taken place comes in the form of retrieval practice tech-niques, including those laid out by Kate Jones in her series of books on the subject. Well-planned multiple choice questions are one way of demonstrating this and demonstrate that, whilst knowledge organisers are a great tool in the retrieval practice arsenal, implemented independently is not enough, but entwined with other forms of retrieval practice is where they really come into their own. As with anything, you will see the greatest benefits of something based on the way that it is utilised within the classroom.

As has already been stated (but cannot be overstated), knowledge organisers are a great tool for teachers in the classroom when it comes to planning, teaching and assessment. However, children need to be given the opportunity to engage with them. One way of supporting this outside the classroom is by sharing them with parents. The way that we have done that in my setting is, at the beginning of each term, our knowledge organisers are sent to parents via our school bulletin with a pre-amble as to what they are and how they can be used e ectively

to support the learning of the children.

We also state how parents can be supporting the acquiring of key knowledge with their children themselves. What this sharing of knowledge organisers also achieves is a communication with par-ents as to what is being taught in the classroom. It promotes revision techniques as we ask for these to be printed, pinned to the fridge or bedroom wall and it also promotes discussion around the dining table.

In a world dominated by screens and digital media, we see this as a great way for children (and par-ents) to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of a unit.

In the next issue, I discuss how I have created knowledge organisers for my school, explaining the process and the thought behind them as well as the ‘dos and don’ts’ regarding their creation, ensuring that the benefits of them provide children with the perfect platform to retain and retrieve core knowledge around a subject.

“Using your memory, shapes your memory”

By Darren Leslie

Discussions in my classroom were often a form of disjointed verbal interactions. You could compare them to verbal tennis. I would ask a question, a pupil would respond, I’d ask another, another pupil would respond, and it would go on like that until I was satisfied that we had concluded. Over time, I came to realise that this didn’t qualify as a discussion in its fullest sense. Mainly because the ideas presented were not connected to each other.

To dig a little deeper, a hallmark of a discussion is listening, really listening to one another and this key feature was also missing. You could say we were talking past one another as opposed to talking to one another. The comments would have been slightly related but would not really constitute a discussion, rather a set of statements grouped together to make it look like a discussion, mediated by me, the teacher.

So, I resolved to make discussions in my classroom better and this is when I came across “Habits of Discussion” as outlined by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion 3.0. In his book, Lemov writes that ‘a discussion is supposed to be a mutual endeavour by a group of people to develop, refine, or contextualise an idea or set of ideas, and that’s di erent from a series of loosely related comments’.

To make the discussions in my classroom stronger I needed to implement a set of tools and behaviours that build belonging, ensure psychological safety, and maximise the potential of my pupils so that they would feel comfortable contributing.

Our pupils often provide us with the most profound thinking, if only we take the steps necessary to allow them to shine.

BUILD BELONGING FIRST

Habits of Discussion are a powerful set of tools but to set it up requires developing a series of ‘nearly invisible behaviours that are displayed by participants that signal the importance of the endeavour’. These behaviours such as establishing and maintaining eye contact and subtle prosocial behaviours including nodding to show appreciation and understanding are key to building a strong scholarly classroom culture where pupils feel comfortable to both participate and listen attentively.

Listening carefully to the speaker is a fundamental action that participants need to take. Listening with the intent to “follow on” encourages pupils to show the speaker that they care

about what they have said.

No one makes profound contributions or shares razorsharp thinking with their peers, if the signals in the room tell them that nobody cares.

Another fundamental action that links directly to listening carefully is maintaining eye contact with the speaker. Not only does this show the speaker that you are keen to hear what they have to say, looking at them while they do and giving them your full concentration will help you to hear more of what they are saying. By looking at the speaker you can also pick up on gestures and facial expressions that add meaning and context to what they are saying.

This is extremely useful, especially if you are the one called upon next to contribute. I recognise that maintaining eye contact is not

“Our pupils often provide us with the most profound thinking, if only we take the steps necessary to allow them to shine.”

suitable for some pupils and it isn’t a guarantee that pupils will listen to one another, but it is a behaviour worth developing for the majority.

These behaviours are important because pupils, and most of society, seek a rmation that their words matter. If after you share an insight no one builds on it or recognises your contribution you soon begin to conclude that it isn’t worth speaking.

Encouraging these behaviours begins slowly but they compound to encourage pupils to share their thoughts safe in the knowing that their peers will listen to them and demonstrate this through sending signals of belonging. This is akin to the same young people who post pictures on Instagram and wait desperately for ‘likes’. This a rmation is powerful and we crave it just as much when we speak, as we do online.

By showing that you ‘like’ what a peer has to say through simple hidden cues, it makes it more likely that they will share a first-thought or even a half-developed thought, necessary for a high-quality emerging classroom discussion.

PROVIDE THE TOOLS

Once the behaviours are in place that signal belonging and pupils feel that they are safe to contribute their thoughts to discussions we now need to provide them with the tools necessary, a framework you could say, for talking to, not past, each other.

First, it is vital that the pupils are armed with the necessary knowledge to take part in a discussion. It is of no use to start a discussion if the pupils lack the prior knowledge necessary to take part in a fact-based and

connected discussion. Without being well-informed, discussions could easily result in emotive and argumentative contributions. We want discussions to be rich and connected, this requires a wellinformed group of participants.

Pupils need a framework to help get them started, to teach them how to take part in an academic discussion. To start, I gave them sentence starters that they could use such as ‘I think that...’, ‘I agree with...’ and ‘I disagree with...’. This encouraged the pupils to begin by recognising the previous speaker before o ering their own contributions. It also allows for the teacher to ask questions that don’t demand a correct response immediately.

By asking a pupil what they think you are ensuring that they can kick start a discussion without the fear of wanting to be right. This allows them to start by o ering their thoughts on the matter in hand.

The next pupil that is called upon then as a choice, do they agree or disagree with the previous speaker. This recognition is not only a rming that what you said matters it encourages you to want to speak again.

By beginning your contribution with ‘I agree with Kieran because’ or ‘I disagree with Kieran because’ shows that you were listening. The third pupil that contributes has even more choice, they can agree or disagree with the previous speakers.

This adds even more layers to our fundamental behaviours. The pupils are now looking at one another, using each other’s names in their responses and building on each other contributions. Making it much more of a discussion than the tennis matches we previous embarked upon.

BUILDING MOMENTUM

Once the initial framework is being utilised and perhaps even changed by the pupils. You can build momentum in discussions by adding in a simple question, ‘agree, disagree or build’.

After calling upon a student to provide their thoughts you could say ‘agree, disagree or build’. This does a few things for us. It keeps the correct answer from being revealed and encourages participation and leaves the space open for anyone to contribute.

A pupil may want to agree with Vanessa or disagree with James or build upon what Angus had to say. When the conditions are ripe it is such a powerful question to ask. Three words from the teacher and a series of hands shoot up.

The real power, however, is hearing the students use and build upon the initial framework. Now, when called upon, a pupil could say ‘I’d like to build on what Jessica said because they said this, and I think that they are right, but they missed out this key point’.

This technique builds a strong

classroom culture because it involves pupils making a habit of referring to or revising a previous comment and referencing by name the peer who made the previous point. By doing this we are building belonging and raising the standards of our discussions.

“No one makes profound contributions or shares razor-sharp thinking with their peers, if the signals in the room tell them that nobody cares.”

54. Schema Building and Curriculum Planning In English Donal Hale explores how English teaching might be enhanced by the principles revealed by cognitive science research. 59. The Fiction

About

Writing Non-fiction Why has non-fiction writing had such a troubled time and what can be done to teach students how to write excellent non-fiction pieces?

62. 9 Strategies To Enhance Students’ Experience Of Art In Primary Schools

Nine easy-to-implement strategies to raise the profile of Art and to enhance the experiences of the pupils in your school.

SCHEMA BUILDING & CURRICULUM PLANNING IN ENGLISH

There is much debate in education regarding the role of cognitive science and how its principles can be harnessed into e ective pedagogy. This is often quite contentious and polarising – particularly with it comes to the application of cognitive science to the discipline of English. Donal Hale explores this thorny issue and how English teaching might be enhanced by the principles revealed by cognitive science research.

By Donal Hale

Perhaps it’s the reference to science that puts off many an English teacher from fully embracing this in their practice, or perhaps something else. I can only speculate on that. However, I can say that aspects of cognitive science have been revolutionary in my teaching practice in recent years.

One aspect in particular has been revelatory in shaping my approach to curriculum design: schemabuilding.

What is schema-building?

Let’s break this down into simplistic terms.

A schema is the basic unit of cognition used in learning new information.

In order for a student to retain and understand new information, they need to connect it to information that they already knew. This is called building a schema.

Tom Sherrington (2020) comments on the importance of building a schema as foundational to a teacher’s practice:

‘More and more I feel that it’s really helpful and important for teachers to think in terms of the concept of schema-building: that every student is

piecing together ideas, information, experiences and concepts to form a coherent web that constitutes their understanding and fluency with the material in hand.’

(https://teacherhead. com/2020/10/04/teaching-forunderstanding-schema-building-andgenerative-learning)

A well designed curriculum should be driven by the concept of schema-building, and it is every teacher’s responsibility to ensure students are piecing together ideas and concepts to form a coherent web of the core knowledge that underpins their particular subject.

Below are several approaches to schema-building in an English curriculum I will outline below:

1. Core concepts

An English curriculum can be designed and sequenced using a range of core concepts students continually examine through a range of literary texts. Concepts may be built around, for instance, universal themes from literature, such as:

heroism honour masculinity femininity hierarchy ambition morality inequality

To help build schema, or form a coherent web of core concepts, the teacher should be able to confidently track how a core concept is taught and re-visited through their curriculum, like so:

Hierarchy

Year 7: we teach hierarchy in relation to the ‘Great Chain of Being’ in Macbeth.

Year 8: we teach hierarchy when examining courtship in Much Ado about Nothing.

Year 10: we teach hierarchy through the wealth divide of the Victorian era depicted in A Christmas Carol.

2. Disciplinary knowledge

Disciplinary knowledge is perhaps best described as the action taken within a particular subject to gain knowledge. For example, mastery of English requires students acquiring knowledge of metaphor (the ways in which we use language to create meaning).

Cirque du Freak/Gothic writing (Y7)

Teaching how to write metaphors within the Gothic genre through the use of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’.

Romeo and Juliet (Y7)

Year 9: we teach hierarchy via the corruption of animalism in Animal Farm.

Year 11: we teach hierarchy through the class divide of the Edwardian era depicted in An Inspector Calls.

Again, the concept of schemabuilding is important to signpost to teachers in your department here. Students should build upon prior knowledge, revisit and develop their understanding of metaphor through the curriculum, and how this is taught to do this needs to made explicit too.

Here is an example of how I have mapped out the teaching of metaphor across four units of work, bridging Year 7 and 8, as a starting point that could be developed further into later years.

I am Malala (Y7)

Teaching of metaphor again through the use of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ and ‘ground’ to develop literary analysis. e.g. ‘You have put the first stone in standing water’

Long Way Down (Y8)

Teaching of conceit as a form of metaphor. e.g. the comparison of J to a boat: ‘the bark thy body is/Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs/Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them/ Without a sudden calm, will overset/Thy tempest-tossed body.’

Revisiting conceit in a different literary context with the use of the elevator in the narrative.

3. Explicit vocabulary instruction.

Another way to build schema is by considering how language itself works and connections between words through very clear explicit vocabulary instruction.

One such approach could drawn from Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered (2016) by considering

‘a deep-dive into the meaning and nuances of a word in a lesson, with many opportunities for student practice’.

In any series of lessons that aim to build schema on a grammatical level, I would recommend exploring etymology, common word families, roots and affixes (morphology), as according to Lemov:

‘Teaching students about roots and, prefixes and affixes is another important way to quickly increase the quantity of student vocabulary. Once students have a handle on a relatively small number of roots and affixes, they have significantly boosted their ability to accurately infer meanings of new words, as well as to deeply understand words. Knowing roots and affixes also helps students to grow attentive to a word’s etymology and build a breadth of word knowledge.’ (Lemov, 2016)

Below is an example of how teachers might approach such instruction to help students define the word: ‘wondrously’:

original form of wonder (a feeling of amazement and admiration)

adding the suffix-ly to the end of an adjective turns the word into an adverb

define: in a way that is strange, beautiful or impressive.

In this example, ‘wondrously’ is broken down by its root word (‘wondrous’) and its suffix (‘ly’) to show students how language is formed at a grammatical level.

Next, students can consider its usage in a text of study (in this case the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, in the line:

‘Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear’

Students are tasked with examining its usage in the poem in relation, before attempting to use the word in a sentence of their own to display their understanding of how the word works.

Finally, students take the acquired knowledge of how suffixes work and consider other examples of words which use it to shape a word’s meaning. They might do this through the use of a ‘word web’, which looks like this:

Create a word web:

wondrously strangely beautifully impressively _________ly _________ly

Students make the connections between ‘wondrously’ and other words with the ‘ly’ suffix to help build their schema regarding how language works.

Final thoughts

There are countless ways to help students build schema in the discipline of English. I have outlined three examples, which might of interest. You might have other methods to achieve a similar aim – and that’s great. The point is: schema-building in English is essential to deepen students understanding of the subject and to ensure they learn in a truly meaningful way.

THE FICTION ABOUT WRITING NON-FICTION

Over the years, non-fiction writing has had a bit of a troubled time when being taught in the classroom. Chris Curtis examines why this is and, crucially, what can be done to teach students how to write excellent non-fiction pieces.

By Chris Curtis

No matter what GCSE English specification you teach, you can guarantee that somewhere there will be some form of non-fiction writing, or, as some like to call it, transactional writing.

Oversimplifying the non-fiction form and reducing it to key, visible features has meant that the art of writing a non-fiction piece has been lost. Instead, students produce texts that look but don’t sound like non-fiction writing. How can we get students to write better speeches, blogs, articles, or letters?

One good idea

One thing students get in their heads from an early stage is the listing of ideas in non-fiction texts. This is a clear lie. When convincing people, we rely on one strong reason or idea to convince them. That good idea is so strong that it is enough to persuade people.

In teaching, we often get students to list possible ideas. Each of those ideas becomes a paragraph. Sadly, when students write like this, there’s no connection between those ideas. Instead, we have

loosely linked ideas without any development. And, that is where students fall down: development. By having lots of ideas, it takes quite a bit of skill to weave them together to make a strong argument.

Get students to think of ideas and then narrow those ideas to one ‘killer idea’. That, then, becomes the source of thinking. How do you convince the reader based on this one ‘killer idea’? From that point, students are thinking of shaping the argument and not just listing their ideas.

Structuring the writing

Over the years, students have been trained to list ideas in their writing. That’s why we often see phrases like ‘ One reason is ..’ or ‘Another reason is …’. They become conditioned to write like this because most subjects in school expect them to list reasons in this way. English requires writing to be crafted and, therefore, we need to work against lists of ideas and work towards detailed development of a single idea.

Everything needs an introduction and a conclusion. That’s a given, but students need to know that there are other ways to structure an argument rather than listing one idea after another. We, as a school, use Pathos, Logos and Ethos as a way to shape an argument.

• Pathos: What is the emotional aspect of this idea? Who are the victims? Who are the villains?

• Logos: What is the logical reason behind this idea? What could happen if this isn’t addressed?

• Ethos: What makes you an expert on this issue? Why should you be listened to more than others?

Once students have these aspects in their minds they can think about planning and shaping their one idea. Where can they find emotion? What’s the consequence of inaction? What makes you an expert? Then, they have a way to shape their argument. They have three ways to start. Do you start with emotion? Do you start with consequences? Do you start with your perspective and personal opinion? From that point, students are able to shape their writing and make choices around the impact on the reader.

The students have the same idea all the way through, but through Pathos, Logos and Ethos they are shining different perspectives on that one idea.

Looks are not everything

Non-fiction, unlike other styles of writing, is often seen as being a very visual medium. It is true, but there is also a literary element to it too and that’s always what students always see. They will show off their literary dexterity in a short story, but when it comes to non-fiction they are more obsessed with the look of the text than the quality of their writing.

Students will take more care on the title and pictures than they will with the writing of a paragraph. How many newspaper articles have we read by students that look like newspaper articles but read like something else?

The exams are basically looking for an essay with a hint of a magazine article. That’s how I tell my students to write in the exam: write an essay with a hint of a speech. In fact, I don’t draw attention much to the visual style of the text or even the quick visual markers. The tone of the writing is more important than the looks, so that’s why I spend time looking at creating tone.

Examiners don’t have a checklist when it comes to non-fiction and the tone of the writing sells to the marker if the student has the style right or wrong. No amount of headings, subheadings, pictures, columns or stock phrases are going to lift a piece of writing, unless the tone is right.

False Friends

Over the years, I have seen a growing trend in students’ writing to include vox pops or to give its correct Latin term: Vox Populi. We see students include quotations from various sources and made-up people in an attempt to convince the reader. Sadly, they are simply window-dressing or false friends. They seem to be a good thing, but actually, they detract and water down the argument.

Vox pops present a massive problem in non-fiction writing because they work as padding. When students write an interview with an expert, they often write a lot of words without adding to the

overall argument. Instead, they just repeat what the student said before the interview, but this time with a different made-up person to echo what they’ve already said.

Vox pops aren’t alone in this category of false friends. I’d add surveys and random statistics. Rarely do they lift or add to an argument, but they will fool a student into thinking they are writing a lot and building on their argument.

Tone and impact

Tone is the biggest thing that shows a student’s ability to craft their writing in non-fiction. The difference between the best and

the worst examples of student writing can be seen in their use of tone. The worst examples are often shouty rants that hold the same angry tone throughout. The best examples use a range of tones to emotionally control the reader and the argument. The writer will be serious when necessary and also lighthearted when it is safe to do so.

Oversimplification of tone is something we need to be mindful of. You cannot give students a checklist of tones to use in their writing. Students need to see ‘tone’ in action. That means reading lots of examples and exploring how a writer conveys [and structures] their tone of writing.

Students who write the best have picked up this nuanced writing style and they emulate it in their work. Therefore, in the classroom, it is essential that we draw attention to tone and also to specific changes in tone. By highlighting tone, we show students that they can change their tone of writing. We are giving them options and permission to change their writing voice.

Non-fiction has the potential to be the most engaging element of English in school because it deals with the here and now. For decades, life has been drained out of letters, blogs, articles and speeches. We have been focused on the ‘appearance of non-fiction’ making texts look like a piece of non-fiction, when we should have focused on what non-fiction is really about: thinking.

If there is one thing teenagers have an abundance of his opinions. Nonfiction is that opportunity to turn students from keyboard ranters of the present to thoughtful, reasoned, respectful, nuanced writers of the future.

9 STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF ART IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

By Adele Darlington

Art is a golden subject, one that adds richness, diversity and excitement to the primary school curriculum. A subject that sprinkles joy, happiness, colour and curiosity into schools and classrooms everywhere.

The pleasure isn’t just found in the liberating creative process, but also in the opportunity to admire the work of others, be that peers or other artists. Art also gives children a welcome chance to be free, to explore and to experiment, providing alternative ways for pupils to communicate thoughts and feelings and a platform to express individuality.

Here are some strategies you can use to raise the profile of Art, both in your primary classroom and across your school.

1. Display It!

What better way is there to celebrate the artistic talents of your pupils than displaying them in prominent shared spaces around your school? Exhibiting artwork has a positive impact on everyone who passes it – they’ll stop, admire it, talk about it and enjoy it!

Have a think about that bit of wall by the canteen, the space in the corridor, the back of the hall, that corner in the office, the entrance foyer and the wonderful artwork that could fill it. It doesn’t have to be a specially commissioned piece, more a celebration of the day-to-day artwork created in class. Striking displays of pupil artwork give a warm welcome to all who enter your building, create positive first impressions of your school and demonstrate a real passion for the subject.

Fundamentally, art is created to be viewed and admired, so following on from those shared spaces in school, think about where the magic happens - the classrooms. Develop your pupil’s self-esteem, pride in their work and confidence in their creations by making galleries in individual class spaces. Putting empty frames on the wall at the beginning of the year means there is space to fill as soon as the artwork is ready to be celebrated. When it’s time to refresh the gallery, the frames are there ready to be emptied and refilled! Children LOVE to see their work framed and enjoy discussing both their own work and that of their peers.

Framing is, of course, not the only way to display work – plinths made from cardboard boxes, hangers dangling from the ceiling and different shelving options all

In the current educational climate, timetables are tighter than ever, so how can we ensure our pupils are given more of this beautiful subject, not less? Adele Darlington discusses easy-to-implement strategies to raise the profile of the subject and to enhance the art experiences of the pupils in your school.

offer interesting ways to exhibit creations. Once established, other classes, parents and carers can be invited in to experience the beauty of the class galleries at various points during the year!

2. Talk about it!

In education, the positive impact ‘reading teachers’ have on encouraging a culture of ‘reading pupils’ in their school is often spoken about. The same story can be told for every subject. Indeed, pupils seeing adults enjoying, embracing and championing subjects has a profound effect on their own attitudes towards them. With this in mind, share a love and passion for art with your pupils.

Talk about your favourite artists and ask them about theirs. Discuss likes and dislikes and admire work together. While children are carrying out art sessions, join in and discuss the process! Model exploration and experimentation in

a sketchbook alongside them, make mistakes and try again, discussing techniques as you go. The children will thrive off your enthusiasm and that of other teachers, it really is contagious!

3. Give pupils a voice!

In many schools, student councils, eco-teams and sports ambassadors are commonplace. Adding an art council to the list of groups children can belong to is a great way to offer them the chance to share their creativity with the whole school. Children love to belong to a ‘club’ and joining an art council is sure to excite those with a real interest in the subject.

Encourage them to ‘apply’ for a position and really think about the strengths and skills they can bring to the team. Decide on some whole school art projects together, plan a schedule and work towards your goals! Projects could be linked to whole school themes, sourcing

visitors, trips and workshops, choosing new equipment, running competitions and more.

4. Work Together!

As a school, work together to create something fabulous – either led by staff or using pupil voice from the art council to drive a project forward. Link your project to special events on your school calendar or theme your project to national or international-themed days or weeks such as World Oceans Week or World Book Day.

Classes can create work on the theme to display together in a whole school gallery or create some big art with every pupil contributing in some way. There are also national projects to get involved in such as The National Gallery’s Take One Picture initiative Take One Picture | Learning | National Gallery, London or The Crafts Council’s Yinka’s Challenge Craft School: Yinka’s Challenge (craftscouncil.org.uk).

5. Run Art Assemblies!

Assemblies can be fun, but they can also become a bit mundane. Have you ever thought about sprucing up your whole school assembly schedule and introducing your pupils to artists, genres, and skills from across the art spectrum? Why not tell them the life story of interesting and inspirational artists that aren’t on your curriculum, blow their minds with amazing aspects of colour theory or demonstrate skills for them to rehearse together during the assembly? Whatever you choose to focus your assembly on, it is sure to inspire your pupils and leave them wanting to find out more.

6. Host Workshops!

Put the feelers out amongst your parents and local community and you are bound to find individuals with hidden artistic talents and job roles. Invite them into school to run workshops alongside teachers to enhance the art experiences of your pupils. You’ll be surprised how many graphic designers, ceramicists, interior designers,

architects, fashion illustrators, cake decorators and more are willing to come in and share their passion for their craft with your school.

7. Include Art on your Newsletters!

Whether your school newsletters are weekly, monthly or termly add a special section to celebrate art in your school. You may wish to focus on the learning of a particular class, the achievements of a particular pupil or the current art council project. Sharing your arty news with parents/carers will undoubtedly encourage discussion on the subjects with their children at home.

8. Learn About an Artist of the week!

In addition to your art and design curriculum studies, share an artist of the week, month or term with your pupils. Each class can look at different pieces of artwork by the same artist which they can then share with other children in school. This is a great way for pupils to learn the skills of comparing and

contrasting and provides a platform for them to express their likes and dislikes in relation to art.

If children learn about and admire artwork from one artist every half term that equates to six a year or forty-two throughout their primary school education! I’m including EYFS in this calculation because children are never too young to develop a love of art!

9. Make Cross-Curricular Links!

Raise awareness of the value of art and design across the curriculum by drawing attention to the role of art for different purposes.

Highlight anatomical drawings and their importance in science, map-drawing in geography, the importance of the illustrator in storytelling, drawings as historical sources – the links are endless!

A love for art leads not only to enjoyment for its own sake, but also to a multitude of career opportunities, so it’s important we share this knowledge with our pupils.