HWRK Magazine: Issue 18 - January 2022

educational magazinefor teachers the essential magazine

HWRK JANUARY 2022 / ISSUE 18 / FREE HWRKMAGAZINE.CO.UK

WRITTEN BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS

CURRICULUM THE NEVER-ENDING JOURNEY ALSO INSIDE: WHY SHOULD WE TEACH CLASSICS? A LESSON IN COLD-CALLING

WHY SCHOOL TRIPS ARE SO PRECIOUS IS GATSBY REALLY SO GREAT?

IS YOUR MARKING POLICY TOXIC? THE TRUTH ABOUT

TUTORING

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The very nature of our job requires us to develop others. It is the bread and butter of teaching. We teach and develop young people on a daily basis.

Alongside this we develop ourselves from weekly staff meetings, courses, edubooks, conferences, teachmeets, NPQs and of course good old fashioned Twitter debates.

Something that often gets overlooked when thinking about developing ourselves professionally is mentoring a trainee teacher. Typically, we think of the trainee’s development. Of course this is integral and should be the key priority, however, we do not always factor in the huge benefits mentoring can have on our own practice.

PEDAGOGY

From early on in my teaching career I have worked with trainee teachers.

I have been a mentor to both trainee teachers and Newly Qualified Teachers (now known as Early Career Teachers) For the past few years it has been an integral part of my working practice.

I am currently a Professional Mentor overseeing the SCITT programme in my school. It is one of the most satisfying elements of my role. Here is why:

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HANDS UP FOR HANDS DOWN PEDAGOGY

in association with

THE IMPORTANCE OF MODELLING IN PRIMARY

HANDS UP FOR HANDS DOWN

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Should students put their hands up to answer questions in class, or does that cause more problems than it solves? A “No Hands Up” policy may not be the answer, as Adam Boxer explains.

PEDAGOGY

in association with

By Adam Boxer

RESILIENCE IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

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FEATURE

RESILIENCE IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM What precisely does resilience mean and what does it look like in the English classroom? Zoe Enser tackles this head-on in her latest piece for HWRK Magazine…

By Zoe Enser

I used to work in a school that started a “no hands up” questioning policy. There was an understandable concern that in many lessons the same few students were always being chosen to answer questions, and that a number of students might have fallen under their teachers’ collective radars. The policy didn’t work and was abandoned after a couple of weeks. As a very early career teacher I remember struggling with it myself, though at the time I couldn’t really articulate why.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and a bit more classroom expertise, it’s pretty clear to me that this policy was well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. These reasons can shed light on what effective CPD can look like and perhaps how policies aimed at improving pedagogy can be better designed.

WHAT DO MENTORS GET FROM MENTORING?

First, a blanket policy like this fails to distinguish between different types of question. If I am asking students a free recall

question about something I taught them last week, or the homework they were supposed to do, then a “no hands up” approach is the right route.

Students should know the answer, so you should be able to pick any of them. However, if it is a question regarding which students might be a bit shakier - perhaps I am pushing their learning forward, or appealing to opinions about something just covered - then picking students who quite reasonably do not know the answer can feel a bit unfair. So, choosing students with their hands up in such a circumstance doesn’t ignore everyone else, it just acknowledges that not everybody is expected to have an answer to this question at this time.

Secondly, it came with very little training about how to implement it. It’s all very well saying “don’t let students put their hands up,” but that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving pedagogy around questioning. What should I do if I pick a student and they don’t

TEACHERS AS EXPERTS

know the answer? What should I do if nobody knows the answer?

What should I do if a student says to me before the lesson that they really don’t want to be picked?

How should I talk to the class about the way I am questioning them? What scripts can I use to build confidence in students who aren’t used to speaking up in class? What phrases can I use in a case where a student gets an answer wrong and I want to thank them for being willing to give an opinion but also make it clear that it’s wrong? How do I respond to the student who is just desperate to answer every question and becomes more and more frustrated that they aren’t being picked? At what point should I not do questioning like this and should I use miniwhiteboards instead? This level of detail is rarely considered when discussing new strategies, but it leaves teachers entirely underprepared for classroom implementation.

Outlining the above may sound patronising, however it does happen. And this is why I think it happens: teachers, who we can think of as experts, particularly in things such as adding and dividing numbers in fairly simple equations, often find it difficult to recognise how much new learning needs to be broken down for the learner. This is not because they are bad teachers, rather that they are experts and know how to do something without even really having to put much thought into it.

There are a number of plausible reasons for this kind of questioning, which all have direct ramifications for classroom use.

For example: students with their hands up gives you unreliable information about class understanding as they are the ones most likely to know the answer.

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PLANNING FOR MODELLING As already mentioned, this starts at the planning stage. At this point, when sitting in your PPA session, you must be thoughtful about what the children know already, what they don’t know yet and how you are going to break

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CURRICULUM

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1) A sound can be represented by 1,2,3 or 4 letters.

2) One sound can be represented with different spellings.

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3) The same spelling can represent different sounds (known as code overlap).

For many, the teaching of spelling can seem like a mammoth task, with no clear way to begin. Neil offers his suggestions about how spelling can be taught methodically and efficiently in Part 2 of his series on spelling.

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Let’s look at this in practice by looking at the incorrect spellings of the title of this article and the previous one. For this, words between two slashes represent the sound and the letters between two angle brackets will represent spelling.

Let’s tork abawt spelling

By Neil Almond

Let’s Toark Abought Spelling: Palt tough In the November 2021 edition of HWRK Magazine, I offered readers an extremely brief tour and overview of modern English, tracing it back to its ancestral roots of Proto Indo-European and the cocktail of geopolitical and social influences that have impacted the language over many years to its modern-day incarnation. In this article, I want to talk more about the structure of the English language, and start to appreciate how it is that we may begin teaching spelling so that it sticks.

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As mentioned in the previous article, English is such a hard language to read and spell is because it has a deep orthography or complex code.

Depending on your accent there are approximately 44 sounds that make up every word in the English language In English there are multiple ways to spell the 44 sounds of the English system - around 176 common spellings to be precise. In primary schools, this process begins formally in Reception through phonics lessons (instruction in phonics, whether systematic and synthetic or not, is any attempt to explain to anyone what sound is being represented by a singular or collection of abstract symbols) and, depending

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LET’S TOARK ABOUGHT SPELLING: PALT TOUGH

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Literacy

LET’S TOARK ABOUGHT SPELLING: PALT TOUGH

“Resilience is related closely to the knowledge we hold and the experiences we had to obtain it”

The next step then is to use some of your precious planning time to work out what you are going to say and what you are going to do to show children how to be successful in this new learning, taking into consideration the concept of 2-dimensional modelling (content and procedure).

Although it takes quite a lot of time, it really is worth doing.

You will reap the benefits when, in the classroom, you don’t have to repeat your explanations time and time again to children who have not understood the content or the procedure.

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So what might we need to change?

down what they don’t yet know into bite-sized chunks.

“Do I want to make sure every student gets the chance to ask a question, or do I want to target questions towards students that will help me get a better picture of whole class understanding as it builds over time?”

These two ramifications might not be entirely mutually exclusive, but they are definitely in conflict. Do I want to make sure every student gets the chance to ask a question, or do I want to target questions towards students that will help me get a better picture of whole class

RAMIFICATION: ask one of your weaker students the question. If they get it right, you can make a decent assumption that most others know it too.

As teachers, when planning and preparing our teaching, we must

understanding as it builds over time? Without being explicit or clear about our reasons, we run head-first into such conflict.

students with their hands up does not ensure that every student feels like their voice is heard.

RAMIFICATION: across the course of one or two lessons, make sure that every student answers at least one question.

1. REASON: picking

Thirdly, there was limited analysis of the reason why we were making such a change.

2. REASON: picking

remember that there is a lot that children don’t know, that they are novices, and that if we want them to learn new things, we need to model those new things carefully and thoroughly in order to give them the best chance of being successful.

IS GATSBY REALLY SO GREAT?

Before we analyse the words in to see how I have made use of the structural knowledge, let’s look at the number of sounds in the words that have been spelt incorrectly. ‘Talk’ is comprised of 3 sounds, ‘about’ spelt with 4 sounds, ‘part’ with 3 sounds and ‘two’ with 2 sounds. Across all the words within the title, you can see how a sound has been represented by a different number of letters - /t/ has been represented by one letter <t>, /or/ has been spelt with 3 letters <oar> (as in ‘boar’), /aw/ has been represented by 4 letters <ough> and /ar/ is represented by the spelling <al> (as used in the word half).

on which phonics scheme your school uses, will depend on when this type on instruction ends and how many spelling alternatives are taught.

Phonics is also the main method by which students are beginning to learn to decode; I use this word purposefully as it encompasses what is rarely understood outside of education: writing systems are codes where the act of taking abstract symbols off the page and converting those into the correct sounds is the act of cracking the code. The act of writing a string of abstract symbols (which we call letters), with spaces between them when required, is the act of writing the code.

Understanding this simple principle is one of the keys to understanding how to spell effectively and how to support student in their spelling. This means that to spell (and read) most words in the English language a mastery of the 176 common spellings is required to represent the approximate 44 sounds used within the language.

purpose – simply putting on an external speaker doesn’t pass muster. Students need to be sold the point of these sessions. All too often these are put on KS4, after options have been taken, and the boat has been missed regarding ‘informed choices’.

That one sound can be represented with different spellings can be seen when comparing the two titles above. /or/ is represented by <or> and by <oar> and /aw/ is represented by <aw> and <ough>.

CEIAG needs to start earlier; much earlier than the statutory Y8 proposed by Gatsby. Primary schools have a part to play in this; there’s evidence that student career choices are affected by their knowledge of employment opportunities though limited networking opportunities in their social circles; this is also a great place to start challenging stereotypes.

This broadening of horizons needs to be carried on in secondaries, where engagement needs to be seamless right from the beginning of Y7.

Finally, that the same spelling can represent different sounds can be seen by the spelling <ough> where it is used to represent the spelling of the sound /aw/ and /oo/ in ‘about’ and ‘two’.

From this, any activity used to promote learning to spell should enforce those principles.

Therefore, I am personally sceptical about activities that force students to look at words as ‘whole’ units as if each word is a distinct picture themselves. Such activities include the ever popular ‘look, say, cover, write, check’ and looking at word shapes. In these activities

Along with understanding letters are used to code sounds, other structural knowledge about the English language that is important to know to teach and learn to spell effectively include the following:

“CEIAG needs to start earlier; much earlier than the statutory Y8 proposed by Gatsby”

Obviously this leaves those working in education in a difficult position. We HWRKMAGAZINE.CO.UK

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have the evidence to show that graduate careers provide the best opportunities for social mobility, positively affecting health, life expectancy and life-time earnings. However, we also risk removing student voice, and damaging self-concept by not respecting the choices of the full range of students and families in our communities. I would argue that there is a time to park our inner-academic egos, and understand that our role is more than passing on a passion for our subject, but also to enable those in our charge to make informed decisions regarding their futures.

Admittedly, I do have a personal perspective here; I was one of the students from a socially deprived background – a living example of one of these statistics. I was written off at secondary school, as I wasn’t someone that was destined for university. I dropped out of sixth-form to take up an

engineering apprenticeship in the Army.

I’m a “black-hand trade”, that trade was key to me changing my outlook on learning and aspirations. It was only this year that during a presentation to a group of teachers that I checked myself as I said “I’ve never been an academic…”; this was a blatant lie.

Three degrees, one of which involved research into the efficacy of careers provision in areas of social deprivation, were there on the board for me to reflect on.

Yet, right there at the start of it all was seventeen-year old me, learning how the internal combustion engine worked, and wanting to be the best mechanical engineer that I could be. I just needed to find my first steps in believing I could be really good at something – this is the role of the classroom teacher in CEIAG; to nurture the drive and passion of students and help them make the choices that will gain them “a good job”.

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CONTENTS 05. EDITORIAL: It’s time for toxic marking policies to go.

FEATURES 07. RESILIENCE IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

How do we build resilience in the students in our English classrooms?

PEDAGOGY 22. HANDS UP FOR HANDS DOWN

What does cold-calling look like in the classroom?

10. BADMANISM FOR LEARNING

27. TEACHING THE ART OF REDRAFTING AND EDITING

What does warm-strict look like in the real world?

How do they differ? How should we teach them?

15. WHAT DO MENTORS GET FROM MENTORING?

33. THE IMPORTANCE OF MODELLING IN PRIMARY

Why being a mentor has profound effects Why modelling is the unsung hero of teaching on the mentor, not just the mentee. strategies and how we can maximise it.

CURRICULUM 40. VIEWING THE CURRICULUM AS A NEVERENDING STORY

48. LET’S TOARK ABOUGHT SPELLING: PALT TOUGH

Curriculum is the one job that is never truly finished, so how should we approach it?

The second installment of Neil Almond’s series on the science of teaching spelling.

45. LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS

Why a common mathematical language for students and staff is vital for success.

52. THE CASE FOR CLASSICS

How we can weave Classics into our lessons and why we should do so.

EXPERIENCE 58. THE SECRET LIVES OF TUTORS

How the tutoring industry impacts the lives of teachers.

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60. IS GATSBY REALLY SO GREAT?

62. WHAT MAKES SCHOOL TRIPS SO PRECIOUS?

Why CEIAG requires a careful rethink.

An emotional reminder of why trips are crucial for our students (and perhaps us too).

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CONTRIBUTORS WRITTEN BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS

Samuel Elliott

Mary Myatt

Adam Boxer

Kate Jones

Having grown up, lived in and taught in deprived areas affords Samuel key insights into misbehaviour. This, combined with research into behavioural psychology, has given rise to a pedagogy borrowing from traditional and progressive philosophies.

Mary Myatt is an education adviser, writer and speaker, who has written extensively about leadership, school improvement and the curriculum.

Adam is Head of Science at a North London Academy and he blogs at achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com. He is a co-founder of Carousel Learning, a holistic online quizzing platform aimed at improving student retention in all school subjects.

Kate Jones is Head of History at The British School Al Khubairat, Abu Dhabi. Kate is also the author of Love To Teach: Research and Resources for Every Classroom and the Retrieval Practice collection. Kate can be found on Twitter and Instagram.

@ASBOTeacher

Emma Cate Stokes @emmccatt

Emma Cate Stokes is a KS1 teacher and Phase Lead at a coastal school East Sussex.

Christopher Mann @chrismann755

Year 6 teacher. English lead. KS2 lead writing moderator. Likes include climbing, writing, music and drawing.

Libby Isaac @libbyisaac

@MaryMyatt

Libby has been a Head of School and cross-trust Assistant Headteacher for Teaching and Learning. She is also an educational consultant focused on the primary Humanities curriculum, a school improvement consultant with TT education, and a TTRadio host. Libby also consults for the Oxford University Press and Historical Association.

@KateJones_teach

Clive Hill

Shannen Doherty

Neil Almond

Clive is Lead Teacher for Science at a Derby Academy. Founder of @NetworkEDEM and member of The Chartered College of Teaching Council.

Shannen is a senior leader and class teacher at a primary school in London.

She loves all things Maths and enjoys getting nerdy about teaching and learning. Shannen’s debut book, 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Maths, came out in May 2021.

Neil was a classroom teacher for 5 years before leading Teaching and Learning in a small academy trust.

Now he is a deputy headteacher on Thornton Heath. He regularly blogs and speaks at educational events around the country.

@Clive_Hill

Lauran HampshireDell @Lauranteaches

@adamboxer1

Lauran is a Surrey-based English tutor and intervention/GCSE retake teacher who, after 5 years in state schools, now predominately works within the AP sector. She has been teaching for 7 years, and credits herself for keeping Stabilo in profit during that time.

@MissSDoherty

@Mr_AlmondED

Aidan Severs

Zoe Enser

Aidan is currently a primary deputy head in an all-through school in Bradford. In January he will be working with teachers and leaders as a consultant, having set up Aidan Severs Consulting. You can book him to work with your school and read his blog articles at www.aidansevers.com.

Zoe Enser was an English Teacher for over 20 years and is now working as the Specialist English Adviser for The Education People and an ELE (Evidence Lead in Education) for the EEF (Education Endowment Foundation) in the Kent area. She is also the co-author of Generative Learning in Action and the upcoming CPD Curriculum: Creating the Conditions for Growth, both written in collaboration her husband, Mark Enser.

@AidanSevers

@greeborunner

HWRK MAGAZINE PUBLISHED BY HEALTH NEWS qUARTERLY LTD 5 Hackins Hey, Liverpool L2 2AW, UK E: enquiries@hnqgroup.co.uk T: 0151 237 7311 EDITOR Andy McHugh PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Alec Frederick Power DESIGNER Adam Blakemore MANAGING DIRECTORS G Gumbhir, Alec Frederick Power Legal Disclaimer: While precautions have been made to ensure the accuracy of contents in this publication and digital brands neither the editors, publishers not its agents can accept responsibility for damages or injury which may arise therefrom.

No part of any of the publication whether in print or digital may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission of the copyright owner.

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EDITORIAL: WHO ARE WE DOING THIS FOR? As we begin a new year, it’s useful to reflect on the previous one and try to learn something from it. In many cases, the lesson to be learned is to slow down, cut out what doesn’t matter and do what is best for our students.

Now, you might think this is obvious, or even condescending, after all, what teacher sets out to do their secondbest, or who enjoys giving themselves more to do than is necessary? But the problem is, as a profession, we often do. There’s a pandemic alright, but I’m not talking about Covid-19, it’s the tragedy of toxic school policies that lead to burnout. And it affects us all.

Workload policies have begun to creep into schools over the past year or two and rightly so. Workload is an enormous factor in the decisionmaking of teachers who choose to leave the profession every year. But policies alone don’t seem to have solved the problem. This is partly because they are sometimes used to make a “challenging” workload appear more palatable, at least to the casual observer. But in the main, I believe that they simply aren’t ambitious enough. Tinkering around the edges by cutting the odd meeting, putting fruit in the staffroom, or adding a “wellbeing day” is genuinely nice, welcome even. But, like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, it doesn’t really make a difference.

It comes down to the “big stuff ”, the things that many school leaders, often

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led by Ofsted (apologies for mentioning them this early in the term) are often wedded to out of habit, or perhaps even out of fear. And the biggest of them is feedback.

Let me say this, for those of you with worse hearing than mine at the back: FEEDBACK IS NOT MARKING. But we often treat them as if they are synonymous. They aren’t. Marking is one form of feedback. But its effectiveness is highly dubious. Add in the fact that it consumes a ridiculous amount of time and energy, with so little return on that investment and you can see why so many teachers hate it.

Fortunately, the tide is turning, with more and more schools relying *exclusively* on other methods to ensure students make continuous progress. Whole class feedback, for example, is a complete gamechanger. When planned thoroughly and then implemented thoughtfully in the classroom, it has far-reaching consequences for the students, especially when you give your students time, then and there, to respond to that feedback. It can address whole-class issues, or errors and misconceptions made by single individuals. But it only takes a few minutes to plan and execute, not hours and hours of writing the same comments over and over, only for the students to glance at those comments and do little about them next time they complete their work.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand why some teachers love to write individualised comments on every student’s work. We like to think that every student will take on board those carefully crafted messages and that they matter as much to the students as they do to the person who wrote them.

However, apart from the odd outlier, I don’t see much evidence of that. Most comments aren’t unique to a single student, many comments are largely irrelevant by the time they’re read and some of them make no sense at all to the student, without the teacher also talking about them at length. They might as well not have been written and I think, deep down, many of us resent how true that is. We’ve just gone along with it. It’s policy.

So, if your students aren’t benefitting from it, who are we doing it for? If your answer is “for SLT” or “for Ofsted”, then you might want to reconsider what you’re here for too, because you’re not solving anyone’s problem.

Here’s a New Year resolution for you to consider then: Let’s get rid of marking.

Nobody can say we didn’t give it a good go and that our motives weren’t pure.

It just wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Andy McHugh

Editor | HWRK Magazine

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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.

FEATURE

RESILIENCE IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM What precisely does resilience mean and what does it look like in the English classroom? Zoe Enser tackles this head-on in her latest piece for HWRK Magazine…

By Zoe Enser

“Resilience is related closely to the knowledge we hold and the experiences we had to obtain it” HWRKMAGAZINE.CO.UK

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Resilience is a term which we hear a lot about at the moment. The ability to persevere, particularly in the face of difficulties is a much-valued quality and knowing how to ‘bounce back’, especially when struggling or things have not gone the way we hoped is something that is at the top of many agendas, both for adults and children. Increasingly I see people worried that students are showing less resilience and the race is on to ensure that they are taught how to deal with complex situations and scenarios. Often people think resilience relates to either something transferable or something inherent in the learner. You either can be taught it as part of a program in tutor time or some people are more resilient than others. It is an idea which has much in common with ‘growth mindset’ and having this outlook is often seen as a key factor in achieving this. I have heard many teachers being told they need to build their own resilience. To that I’d say, walk a day in my shoes and you will see how resilient I am. And the same is true of our children.

Our students have lived through exceptional circumstances in the recent years and have had to deal with things which we would never have imagined as children. Their perspectives are different to that of us adults, but there is no doubt it has been hard on them, changing huge aspects of their lives which they had only just started to explore. Still those same children arrive at school with smiles on their faces, greeting their friends, and, in most cases, ready for whatever new set of challenges come their way. Indeed, some young people have experiences which we would never want to have to imagine and their resilience to keep going despite this is to be applauded.

However, what I think is often left out of the resilience conversation is context.

Resilience is related closely to the knowledge we hold and the experiences we had to obtain it. I would question the notion that resilience is something that can be taught in isolation and, much like confidence, it is something which we develop as we learn and experience things in a domain specific way. Therefore, I know I am very resilient when dealing with difficulties in a classroom as I have many years of experience about how they work, whilst I may be less resilient when encountering new situations which might occur outside of them. Resilience then needs to be looked at within the context we are in and what challenges they present.

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Resilience can also be a difficult thing to explain. It seems intangible. As adults much of the knowledge we have accumulated which allows us to be resilient, has become tacit; that is, it is so embedded into our schemas it has become automated. We no longer need to think about it, we just do it. As a result, we don’t always recognise the complexity of what we are asking students to do as it is just there at our fingertips. Read a book, write a paragraph, complete an equation are easy things when you have the knowledge and experience embedded, less so when you don’t.

The same is true for me when I move outside of my area of expertise. When tackling something challenging in English, even if initially I may find it hard or get it wrong, I am going to be much more resilient than if you ask me to do something in Science. When I step outside of my comfort zone you might see my resilience waning regardless of how resilient I might be elsewhere. You may even find me having a quiet cry if it was something to do with Physics.

Young people also do not have the experiences and knowledge to deal with the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, things so complex we as adults often find difficult too. Generic conversations about ‘being more resilient’ or ‘get more grit’ are unlikely to help them navigate these then either. They need concrete experiences and knowledge of different situations in order to be able to develop this in a meaningful way.

Having reflected on the idea of resilience over time, my approach, both in English and in pastoral care, has changed over time. Instead of rousing speeches where I aim to get students to feel determined to achieve, although these still have a place at the right moment, I aim to provide explicit examples of how this relates to my subject or the context of the situation.

When starting a new challenge, I will link this directly to the learning students have already encountered. I support them in making these clear connections to their prior knowledge and experiences, so they have an opportunity to allow them to activate what they already have available to them and to get them to think about it in a metacognitive way.

As they consider what tools they have available to them they become more able to plan the approach they will take,

drawing on the familiar despite the unfamiliar framing this new task may have.

They are then much more able to monitor their progress and evaluate how they are doing as they go along. I use pause points during the task to help them to do this, asking questions which we ultimately want them to be able to ask themselves when they work alone at a later stage.

Therefore, when I am asking students to complete a thesis statement for a literature essay, I may get them firstly to look at models and examples we have created in class. I would then ask them to consider what worked well when they previously did this, referring back to their previous work, including any developments they made based on feedback. I then give them reminders as they go through the process to check for the main components, including clarity and accuracy, and then consider at the end, sometimes through sharing with the whole class on a visualiser or through peer and self-review, how effectively they achieved what they set out to do.

Over time scaffolds are removed as processes become more automated which leads students to increasing independence, even when attempting something extremely challenging. This, to me, shows they are resilient, but of course won’t mean they are resilient when tackling a problem in Maths or Science or History, although having known what it feels like to struggle and succeed in any area can have a positive knock-on effect. It just needs to be replicated in the other areas to really have an impact.

The same process has also become embedded when talking to students about dealing with wider problems with their peers, their self-study and their lives generally. I try to give them the tools and the time to explore how they will go about this, even encouraging them to rehearse a conversation which they need to have, making use of words and phrases which they know have had a good effect previously and discarding those which have had a less positive outcome.

So, ‘based on your experience of calling someone a name in retaliation, what do you think might happen if you take that approach?’ They might belligerently think they might feel better for a while, but logic will eventually tell them they need to choose a different path.

Relating whatever the task might be back to their previous successes and struggles is

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FEATURE

an important aspect of the process though.

Being able to draw on clear examples of where they have previously found something difficult, for example when asked to write an essay in English or read an unfamiliar text, and showing them what they achieved, can really emphasise how resilient they have already been. We can then reflect on about the steps they took to achieve this, recalling how they felt before they started and at the end. This helps them to have the resilience to keep going in the face of some real difficulties in the subject and to once again be successful. It can help them to have an understanding of their self-efficacy empowering them to take greater charge of their own learning over time.

Therefore, embedding resilience into their learning, not waving it like a flag in assemblies or simply telling them to get some quickly, is ultimately more successful. It clarifies for students what it really means to persist and be resilient.

Experiencing success leads to more success and motivates us all to stretch ourselves beyond the bounds of where we went before. Children learn to be resilient as we guide them through these stages. Once they know how to do this then they always really amaze us.

Life can be hard, we all have moments when we may not feel as resilient to deal with the knocks we receive, but taking the time to reflect, supporting each other to do so, might mean we are in a better position to bounce back more quickly when they come.

“Over time scaffolds are removed as processes become more automated which leads students to increasing independence, even when attempting something extremely challenging.”

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Badmanism for Learning Samuel Elliott takes us through a day in the life of a teacher connecting with students on their level, all the while bringing them up to his.

By Samuel Elliott

‘Oi, bouncer!’

‘Not that bottle, surely?’

I turned to see five lads ambling towards me like Boris Karloff. Manbags and Air Max trainers against a glowering Edwardian school building – welcome to Birmingham.

‘Yes, the thing is that…’

‘How are we, this morning?’ I said. ‘How were the Rice Krispies?’

‘It’s all about the warm milk, sir.’

‘You keep telling me that but I’m not a rescue kitten, am I? I’ll eat my Rice Krispies with cold milk like a civilised human being – now stand in the line, lad.’

We all laughed.

‘Thassa violation,’ said Kieran. ‘Sir’s mocking it.’

I smiled. Kieran was right: I really was mocking it. With a hand chop, I signalled the line again, reiterating my expectations.

Because what kind of bouncer doesn’t create an orderly queue?

‘We focus on one thing at a time,’ I explained. ‘You need something: you wait.

The line is the priority.’ At the back, a lad was gesturing fiercely enough to wave down a Boeing 747. ‘What is it, Hamza?’

‘Sir, I need to give something to –’ ‘Is it an inhaler?’

‘No, but the thing is…’

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‘That bottle is empty, Hamza, and you’ve twisted it. In fact, it’s not even a bottle anymore – it’s litter. Give me the litter, Hamza.’

He looked at me, thought better of renewing his request, and traipsed to the bin.

The one thing that always bothered me about Shardley Heath was the bins: blue and resembling an ordinary pedestrian bin – until you drew near, that is. They were subtly larger than they should have been. I’m not sure if this was a conscious decision of the designers: a kind of ‘choice architecture’ where larger spatial extent would encourage increased use, or whether they doubled as stage-props for budding Doctor Who enthusiasts in Key Stage 3. Either way, the paradox of them having more litter outside than in was inescapable.

I got inside, booted up SIMS, my timetable looking like a losing game of Tetris.

‘Here we go,’ I thought while taking the register, adrenaline infusing my spit like I’d licked the top side of a battery – a shock to the system, but on the plus side, remaining positive. There was muttering, so I paused my instruction. The muttering continued. ‘Little boy,’ I said, looking at one in particular. ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’

New to the class – a veritable greenhorn in Elliott-ology – he didn’t have a clue.

But the question was geared to impress.

There is something about it: ‘do you have any idea… who I am?’ I mean, who am I – really? Ronnie Pickering or someone? But no, this was no YouTube road-rage video.

The stateliness of the question was an answer in itself, and the Little Boy stopped muttering and told me, ‘It’s calm, sir’.

Not something you’d find in your Bill Rogers.

Lesson one and I’m in a room with a projector and whiteboard. The desks remind me of my own schooldays, where you’d avidly scratch ‘lighthouses’ into them with the point of a compass – because back then, apparently every teacher was a teacher of geography. As for today, I’m a history bossman – certified.

Medicine through time. And the starter is questioning: ‘How would medicine in medieval times be different to today?’ [open] This question is the hook. It does not require much in the way of knowledge, although if they do proffer a factual response, it could then constitute a form of retrieval. Largely, the value of this question consists in the placebo – to soothe, calm, and establish confidence. Once they’ve sat down, I begin writing letters on the board: ‘FH – BB, YB, B, PH.’ I tell them that the prevailing theory is

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FEATURE “Reprimand in Private really does spell RIP to bad behaviour”

the Four Humours, which are Black Bile, Yellow Bile, Blood, and Phlegm. And everyone says it aloud. Soon, I point my pen at each of the initials and the students respond chorally. In five seconds, we have it permanently memorised.

One boy arrived late with his manbag fastened tighter than a seatbelt in a rally car.

‘Off,’ I said. He screwed his face at me before deciding to ignore me and sit with his friend. ‘Young man,’ I said. ‘Come here a second.’

I was never a fan of Praise in Public (PIP), but Reprimand in Private really does spell RIP to bad behaviour: ‘come here a sec’ will do more for your classroom management than any amount of verbal

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warning or written consequence. All the C-system does is establish a kind of league table for bad behaviour. C4s, meanwhile, are so incendiary that they could just as well be called ‘plastic explosive’.

‘What would your mum and dad think,’ I said. ‘If they knew that you were in your history lesson with incorrect uniform, talking over and disrupting your teacher?

Listen, young man. I don’t know you and you don’t know me – but I show respect.

You know what I’m saying?’

He nods.

‘What happens if you wear your manbag in lesson? Why do I care about that?’

‘Because if I can wear it, anybody can wear what they like.’

‘Exactly. Now, am I going to have this conversation again?’

He shakes his head.

‘C’mon,’ I hold open the door.

He was good after that, and I had faith that he would continue to behave. And because I had that faith, he continued to behave. This irrationally rational knot of circular logic is often referred to as the Pygmalion Effect, named after the sculptor of antiquity whose love brought a statue to life.

Up and down the country, history teachers with chisel-tips can hew forth similar miracles wherever they combine strong systems with a faith in the kids.

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But forgive me the sermon. In the frenetic blur that is the five-hour day, Period 5 is soon bearing down on me like an Atlas stone – as it does this time every week.

Quick toilet break, a perspective change, and my memories cast back to that barren room with the textbooks and the IKEA desk. Back when I grafted out those five A levels on my own because nobody could teach me. I snap back: I’m in the midst of that Period 5 and it’s time for Sisyphean shotput as I hurl that rock into the horizon and watch it caroming between hard places in V-shaped valleys. A boardpen, a burgundy tie, and some serious Badmanism for Learning (BfL) – just what the doctor ordered.

‘You know what I’m about,’ I say nonsensically, gesturing as if to resuscitate myself. ‘Siddown, with the books out – you gotcha pen?! Right, John Snow and the pump!’

‘He vandalised the pump,’ says Raihana.

‘Which one?’

‘The Broad Street Pump.’

‘Disease and symptoms.’

‘Sir…’

‘Cholera: dehydration and diarrhoea.’

‘FSV.’

‘Papa Smurf!’ says Alex.

‘Erm, facilities.’

‘Papa Smurf?! What does Alex mean, Riley? Do you know?’

‘Expand upon that.’

‘They called it the blue death – the loss of fluids would render them blue. Like a smurf.’

‘I want Billy to tell me about the inventions of the medical renaissance,’ I say. ‘And I want five key figures of the industrial period named – that’s you, Ameera.’ Billy begins reeling off the inventions as I jot every key letter from the topic. On that bruised and bludgeoned board, grown scabby with smears and indelible curlicues: the residue of thought.

‘You see me? You look in this direction’, I say, too direct to come at them with a SLANT. ‘Florence Nightingale: her life. I want to know, Abbas.’

‘In the – er – that war, sir.’

‘Boo hoo,’ I say. ‘Think rivers.’

‘Crimea,’ he laughs. ‘In that war, the soldiers were out in the tents with poor… sanitation.’

‘Raihana, what do we mean by this word?

Billy, use it in a sentence afterward.’

The fine filaments of knowledge can channel sparks. But to galvanise classes, see the questions as frames in a broader animation.

Each question adds motion and life to static historical figures. But remember: maintain that continuous circulation of factual recall, because if your lesson is a ‘dead ting’, no amount of defibrillation will save you.

For Samuel Dunn

“He was good after that, and I had faith that he would continue to behave. And because I had that faith, he continued to behave.”

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WHAT DO MENTORS GET OUT OF MENTORING? Mentoring trainee teachers is not only a challenge, but it is a true privilege. In this article, Emma Cate Stokes explains just why that is.

By Emma Cate Stokes

“we do not always factor in the huge benefits mentoring can have on our own practice”

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The very nature of our job requires us to develop others. It is the bread and butter of teaching. We teach and develop young people on a daily basis.

Alongside this we develop ourselves from weekly staff meetings, courses, edubooks, conferences, teachmeets, NPQs and of course good old fashioned Twitter debates.

Something that often gets overlooked when thinking about developing ourselves professionally is mentoring a trainee teacher. Typically, we think of the trainee’s development. Of course this is integral and should be the key priority, however, we do not always factor in the huge benefits mentoring can have on our own practice.

From early on in my teaching career I have worked with trainee teachers.

I have been a mentor to both trainee teachers and Newly Qualified Teachers (now known as Early Career Teachers) For the past few years it has been an integral part of my working practice.

I am currently a Professional Mentor overseeing the SCITT programme in my school. It is one of the most satisfying elements of my role. Here is why:

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FEATURE Rediscovering enthusiasm The vast majority of us entered teaching because we wanted to provide young people with the best possible start in life through giving them quality education.

However, there is always a danger when we’ve been teaching for an extended period of time that we begin to lose the wide eyed enthusiasm that we started our teaching careers with. Mentoring a trainee teacher can change all that.

Trainees want to change the world and have the fierce determination to do so.

Their positive energy can revitalise even the most jaded of teachers. With this unbridled enthusiasm comes fresh ideas and perspectives. Yes, some of those ideas may not always be successful but harnessing that energy and using it to motivate the class can have a significant impact on both pupils and mentors.

Trainees bring a level of excitement to the table that is often contagious and reminds us why we entered teaching in the first place.

Building collaborative relationships

Giving up control

Building relationships is a key part of teaching. Not just with our pupils but also with our colleagues. Having those strong working relationships really is an integral aspect of our professional practice. The journey of mentor and trainee should be a shared one that encompasses collaboration and learning. We want to get the very best out of our trainees and ourselves. A strong relationship will help facilitate this. There is something very special about watching a trainee teacher grow professionally and knowing you have been part of their journey.

There are two important components to a good mentor/trainee relationship. These are congenial relationships and collegial relationships. Whilst the congenial relationship focuses on the more personal aspects in terms of feeling part of a team, the collegial element of the relationship is centred upon professional interactions. It is discussing teaching practice, the sharing of knowledge and promoting success of both parties.

Ultimately, the mentor/trainee relationships can last a lifetime. I am still in contact with the majority of the trainees I have mentored and it has been a joy seeing them establish themselves in the world of teaching and knowing I had a small part to play in it.

This is one that many mentors can initially find hard! During my first year as a Mentor I was working with an excellent trainee but I found it difficult to share my classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I loved so many aspects of the mentor experience but giving up classroom control was a learning experience for me.

Up until that point everything had been done my way. The classroom was set up just how I liked it, I had my routines, and my way of doing things. However, I quickly realised that in order for the trainee I was working with to succeed I had to share the class with them, rather than see myself as the one solely in charge. This was challenging to begin with but it allowed me to grow in ways I wouldn’t have considered.

Giving a new teacher the space to experiment with new strategies allowed them to develop and also gave me the chance to see different techniques in action - some successful, some not. Of course some things didn’t work. What is important to bear in mind when this happens is that they are still a novice at this stage and need to be given the chance to develop their practice.

What was particularly powerful was reflecting on these experiments together; refining and changing. This provided the opportunity for rich professional dialogue and forced me to reflect on my own practice.

“Trainees bring a level of excitement to the table that is often contagious and reminds us why we entered teaching in the first place”

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Being reflective Having a trainee requires you to think more deeply about your own practice.

A good trainee will always have lots of questions. Though they can sometimes be overwhelming, particularly when you have a million plates spinning on an average day, they do force a certain amount of contemplation for us as mentors.

How do you assess effectively in the middle of a class input? What does a good seating plan look like? How do you get the class to line up so quietly? Often, trainees will ask questions about things that are second nature to experienced teachers. For us, assessing children during a class input is almost like muscle memory. It is part and parcel of our daily routine. Sharing your thinking with a trainee requires you as the mentor to think more deeply about what you do on a daily basis.

This reflection in some cases can be transformative. It forces us to reflect on the choices we make, the strengths and areas for development and reminds us that we too are still developing.

Giving back Something I love about the role of mentor is it gives us a chance to give back to the teaching community. I am passionate about teaching being one of the very best jobs in the world. We are entrusted with something incredibly precious - the learning of the future generations.

If we want to ensure they are getting the very best teaching we need to make sure we are providing them with the best possible teachers. I see being a mentor as one way of playing my part in this. I won’t lie, working with a trainee can increase workload but the benefits more than make up for it.

We are able to share with trainees our knowledge, skills and expertise to help shape their teaching practice and it is a true privilege to be entrusted with this task.

“Sharing your thinking with a trainee requires you as the mentor to think more deeply about what you do on a daily basis”

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PEDAGOGY

22. Hands Up For Hands Down

What does cold-calling look like in the classroom?

27. Teaching The Art Of Redrafting And Editing How do they differ? How should we teach them?

33. The Importance Of Modelling In Primary

Why modelling is the unsung hero of teaching strategies and how we can maximise it.

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PEDAGOGY

HANDS UP FOR HANDS DOWN Should students put their hands up to answer questions in class, or does that cause more problems than it solves? A “No Hands Up” policy may not be the answer, as Adam Boxer explains.

By Adam Boxer

I used to work in a school that started a “no hands up” questioning policy. There was an understandable concern that in many lessons the same few students were always being chosen to answer questions, and that a number of students might have fallen under their teachers’ collective radars. The policy didn’t work and was abandoned after a couple of weeks. As a very early career teacher I remember struggling with it myself, though at the time I couldn’t really articulate why.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and a bit more classroom expertise, it’s pretty clear to me that this policy was well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons. These reasons can shed light on what effective CPD can look like and perhaps how policies aimed at improving pedagogy can be better designed.

First, a blanket policy like this fails to distinguish between different types of question. If I am asking students a free recall

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question about something I taught them last week, or the homework they were supposed to do, then a “no hands up” approach is the right route.

Students should know the answer, so you should be able to pick any of them. However, if it is a question regarding which students might be a bit shakier - perhaps I am pushing their learning forward, or appealing to opinions about something just covered - then picking students who quite reasonably do not know the answer can feel a bit unfair. So, choosing students with their hands up in such a circumstance doesn’t ignore everyone else, it just acknowledges that not everybody is expected to have an answer to this question at this time.

Secondly, it came with very little training about how to implement it. It’s all very well saying “don’t let students put their hands up,” but that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to improving pedagogy around questioning. What should I do if I pick a student and they don’t

know the answer? What should I do if nobody knows the answer?

What should I do if a student says to me before the lesson that they really don’t want to be picked?

How should I talk to the class about the way I am questioning them? What scripts can I use to build confidence in students who aren’t used to speaking up in class? What phrases can I use in a case where a student gets an answer wrong and I want to thank them for being willing to give an opinion but also make it clear that it’s wrong? How do I respond to the student who is just desperate to answer every question and becomes more and more frustrated that they aren’t being picked? At what point should I not do questioning like this and should I use miniwhiteboards instead? This level of detail is rarely considered when discussing new strategies, but it leaves teachers entirely underprepared for classroom implementation.

Thirdly, there was limited analysis of the reason why we were making such a change.

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PEDAGOGY

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There are a number of plausible reasons for this kind of questioning, which all have direct ramifications for classroom use.

For example:

1. REASON: picking

students with their hands up gives you unreliable information about class understanding as they are the ones most likely to know the answer.

RAMIFICATION: ask one of your weaker students the question. If they get it right, you can make a decent assumption that most others know it too.

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2. REASON: picking

students with their hands up does not ensure that every student feels like their voice is heard.

RAMIFICATION: across the course of one or two lessons, make sure that every student answers at least one question.

These two ramifications might not be entirely mutually exclusive, but they are definitely in conflict. Do I want to make sure every student gets the chance to ask a question, or do I want to target questions towards students that will help me get a better picture of whole class

understanding as it builds over time? Without being explicit or clear about our reasons, we run head-first into such conflict.

“Do I want to make sure every student gets the chance to ask a question, or do I want to target questions towards students that will help me get a better picture of whole class understanding as it builds over time?”

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PEDAGOGY

For me, an additional – and perhaps the most important reason to advocate questioning like this (which is called Cold Call in Teach Like a Champion) is to communicate to students that any one of them could be directly called upon at any point in the lesson, and to therefore increase the number of students who are thinking during your questioning.

If students know that not putting their hand up means they will never get asked, they won’t bother thinking. But when they know they could be asked at any time they stay on their toes. Explaining this principle to staff means that they can start employing a number

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of other strategies in the service of the same goal (like bouncing back to a student who got an answer wrong earlier). This kind of intertwining of the “how” and the “why” of questioning is a much better route to improving pedagogy.

PRIORITIES - Make sure your strategy is not a blanket policy and has enough nuance to cope with a range of situations.

- Make sure you have given teachers enough concrete guidance to be able to implement it in the messy reality of the classroom.

- Make sure that you are crystal clear on the reasoning behind the strategy, that you communicate that reasoning and that is has guided and informed the first two points above.

Don’t just take some idea you saw floating around online or heard at a conference and impose it on staff.

“picking students who quite reasonably do not know the answer can feel a bit unfair”

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TEACHING THE THE ART OF REDRAFTING AND EDITING When students can successfully edit and redraft their own work, they can make astounding progress and produce incredible work.

Christopher Mann takes us through how he teaches those editing and redrafting processes to his students.

By Christopher Mann

“they love spotting where a specifically taught skill can enhance a sentence or the paragraph”

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PEDAGOGY As a teacher of writing, I would maintain that the best type of writing is rewriting.

Amateur writers from any year group will normally fall into one of two categories in regards to their own work. The first is the group that see the best writers in the class, or the best authors of their favourite books and believe the success is almost a magic act whereby these people can instantly achieve brilliant prose.

The other group are those that work hard on their writing and upon handing it in to the teacher, are unable to redraft anything as they see it only as correcting their errors.

I think every teacher has been in the position when a child from their class has handed in a final piece of writing at the end of a unit of work and then felt that sense of disappointment when that child’s work doesn’t flow from sentence to sentence, or perhaps ideas lack development.

This, unfortunately, was how I came to realise the importance of redrafting that is built into the writing process – not just something to be done vaguely at the end of a completed piece of work. Nor should it be something that is relegated to simply correcting spellings, commas and capital letters.

In order for children to redraft their word choice, sentence detail and paragraph coherency, they need explicit instruction, teacher modelling and a carefully crafted sequence of activities. In addition, I always teach the distinctive difference between redrafting and editing.

Both improve writing, but only redrafting focusses on the elements of writing I mentioned above. Editing is about reinforcing the basics of

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writing: punctuation, spelling and capitalisation.

Initially, children need to be guided on the redrafting and editing journey, as it is one that, if done incorrectly, or rushed, will only result in very small gains.

I hasten to add here that this process of redrafting is built in throughout a unit of work, so that the children, over a course of two to three weeks, have experience of redrafting and editing small paragraphs, which they have no ownership over, as well as their peers’ work and finally their own writing.

Children need to develop their confidence in improving their own work and this takes time. To do this, I always begin with a short paragraph that I create, which includes perfectly edited writing – no spelling or punctuation errors. However, there are plenty of undeveloped sentence examples, or sentences that don’t flow from one to the other. This allows children to focus only on the redrafting process.

When presented with an anonymous ‘Child A’ paragraph, I then introduce children to a sequence for redrafting; I begin with the small, wordbased changes, then build up to sentence development and paragraph flow. At each step, I also model the same point of redrafting using a different, but similar, anonymous piece – let’s call it ‘Child B’. This is crucial, as it allows me to model the redrafting skill and speak as a writer, explaining my thought process and the consideration of the reader as I go, therefore developing the children’s metacognition.

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THE REDRAFTING SEQUENCE Precise and varied word development

Sentence variety and development

Creating flow

PRECISE AND VARIED WORD DEVELOPMENT The first area to redraft is word choice. Throughout the entire writing process for a unit, I will explicitly teach words that are related to both the subject of the writing and the purpose. I will model using the ‘Child B’ paragraph and focus only on these previously taught words and demonstrate how I can use these appropriately, making sure it doesn’t become a tick list.

Only those words that enhance the writing have a place in my redraft. Further to this, I look for repeated words or phrases (of which I always add some) and this time I first think aloud to see what other options I have already, then I look at a thesaurus if I’m struggling. Occasionally, it won’t be just single word substitution or addition, but will develop into phrase development, which is fine. After I have finished with this section of redrafting, I pass it onto the children looking at their own ‘Child A’ piece, whilst providing them with a clear success criteria: a) Can you add any language from the working wall, or change words you have used already to better suit the audience and purpose? b) Are there any repeated words or phrases that need changing or taking away?

To complete their redraft, we introduce tracing paper

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Purposeful skills

positioned on top of the paragraph of ‘Child A’. This technique allows children to develop their confidence in making changes (however scruffy) without having to commit to these changes. The class use highlighters when selecting the language that they want to redraft, or pens to show where they want to add in additional language or phrases.

Each time a change is made, and I model this explicitly myself, children read aloud their sentence to feel the changes they have made in the shoes of a reader.

SENTENCE VARIETY AND DEVELOPMENT Next in the sequence of redrafting is developing the sentence level detail. Again, I would model this using my own paragraph of ‘Child B’ first.

I would start by reading my whole paragraph first, including the new changes in order to get a sense of which sentences I want to develop. Once I have identified my sentence, I would share my reason with the class and continue by developing necessary detail through skills the children have already been taught such as relative clauses, subordinate clauses and adverbials. Children would then return to their own paragraph and, with a success criteria available, they would make these suggested redrafts to their tracing paper.

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PEDAGOGY CREATING FLOW One of the last stops on the redrafting journey is ensuring the paragraph flows seamlessly from one idea seamlessly to the next. These techniques include: adverbials to guide the reader through time or place; use of pronouns to replace repeated nouns; alternative nouns or adjectives to avoid unplanned repetition; subordinating conjunctions to link ideas together. Although each of these steps may sound time-consuming, because the class and I have just one paragraph to redraft, there may only be one or two techniques that are used in the redraft. I would still endeavour to explicitly model both the thinking process and the success criteria the children need to redraft their own paragraph.

When this process of writing is implemented across the school, the older the children become, the less direct instruction and practise they require to redraft and edit.

However, at the beginning of each, year, I would still use this ‘I do – you do’ model to ensure complete understanding and transparency of approach.

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PURPOSEFUL SKILLS This is the moment which allows everyone to revert back to our original audience and purpose for the writing. As a consequence of both, the lessons the children have completed are linked to the skills necessary for writing for the correct audience and purpose – these are your typical objectives such as using formal techniques to gain trust from the reader and developing an atmosphere to create tension. This is the part of redrafting the class normally look forward too as they love spotting where a specifically taught skill can enhance a sentence or the paragraph.

And that marks the final part of the redrafting instruction.

The tracing paper used to track these changes is fairly full now and children then read through their own writing as a reader, including all the changes. Once they are happy with their redraft, they re-write the single paragraph below the example given. The next lesson, the class would normally be set the independent extended writing task, which allows they to use the same process, practised

themselves earlier in the week, to their own writing. Using the one I created breaks down that initial reaction of children which makes them unwilling to want to change anything.

Breaking down the barriers of writing as a single process with an unobtainable outcome (for some) is the principal aim of the redrafting process I use. Instead of a linear process, children see writing as the constant ability to take a draft and improve it. No one sees themselves as the best writer, but they ask who can be the best rewriter? Who can take the ordinary and, with a little work and a clear process, turn it into something glorious.

“Each time a change is made, and I model this explicitly myself, children read aloud their sentence to feel the changes they have made in the shoes of a reader”

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THE IMPORTANCE OF MODELLING IN PRIMARY If there’s one thing that goes out the window faster than anything else in a primary school lesson it’s the modelling. In this piece, Aidan Severs explains why modelling is essential and how we should approach it.

By Aidan Severs

“there is no teaching without modelling”

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PEDAGOGY When time is of the essence, there are certainly some things which can be left by the wayside, such as extra practice time for primary children.

However, in my experience as a primary teacher, it’s the modelling which is either first to go or which is reduced to a tokenistic gesture. But really, there is no teaching without modelling. Certainly, explanations are important, but in the majority of cases an explanation without modelling is often just confusing.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY MODELLING? By modelling we mean showing the children how to do what it is you want them to do. And it really is that simple.

However, modelling does need to be seen as, at its simplest, a 2-dimensional process. For example, we must model not only the subject-based content of a task, but also the how of the task. More often than not, when modelling is done in the primary classroom, it will focus more on the content than the procedure. And, even where, when modelling the content, a teacher also models the process implicitly, primary children often don’t take note of the procedural modelling, only the modelling of the content.

2-DIMENSIONAL MODELLING Let’s take the teaching of the column method for addition as an illustration. A teacher will always be modelling both the content and the procedure, but children will most likely to be focusing on the content. So,

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in this example, the children will be using their brain power to ensure that they understand how to add two numbers using this written method: they will be focusing on things like adding the digits and how to regroup.

What they won’t focus so much on, unless it is explicitly pointed out, is the layout of the written method. Most primary teachers recognise this to be true, remembering all the times when children have made mistakes, or even demonstrated misconceptions, in the way that they set out their calculations on the page, often not aligning the digits in the ones column, the digits in the tens column, and so on.

However, when a teacher models with both the content and the procedure in mind, children make far fewer of these kinds of mistakes. When a teacher explicitly weaves the mathematical content relating to the addition in with the procedural knowledge, stopping to point out that the digits in the ones column must be aligned, children are much more likely to get this right in their own work.

This kind of 2-dimensional modelling can be used to model the smallest details, such as how to set out an equation, right the way up to the greatest of expectations, for example, when children are producing a final draught of a non-chronological report, and need to be shown exactly what the page’s layout could look like.

In English, a teacher might successfully model how to write within a particular genre, but this modelling is done in large

writing on a whiteboard, and does not reflect the actual layout of the page in the child’s English book. A more successful model – an example of 2-dimensional modelling - would be created live during the lesson in a book exactly the same as the children’s own books and would be projected, via a visualiser or camera, on to the board so that all children could see the model well.

MATCHING THE MODELLING TO THE TASK Another modelling pitfall is less to do with the modelling and more to do with the matching of the task that has been planned to the modelling that has been provided.

During the new learning phase of a teaching sequence, if a teacher has not broken down the content into small enough steps, it can be very easy to make this mistake. For example, when teaching short division, it is wise to breakdown the kinds of questions that you are both modelling and asking children to practise.

In this learning-sequence you would want to start with a twodigit number divided by a onedigit number. You might also want to begin with a problem that requires no regrouping and which leaves no remainder, i.e. a problem where the doubledigit number can be divided by the single-digit number exactly.

Once you have modelled this you would not then expect children to complete problems that include regrouping and remainders, or even problems which involve a dividend of more than two digits.

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PEDAGOGY

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TEACHERS AS EXPERTS Outlining the above may sound patronising, however it does happen. And this is why I think it happens: teachers, who we can think of as experts, particularly in things such as adding and dividing numbers in fairly simple equations, often find it difficult to recognise how much new learning needs to be broken down for the learner. This is not because they are bad teachers, rather that they are experts and know how to do something without even really having to put much thought into it.

As teachers, when planning and preparing our teaching, we must

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remember that there is a lot that children don’t know, that they are novices, and that if we want them to learn new things, we need to model those new things carefully and thoroughly in order to give them the best chance of being successful.

So what might we need to change?

PLANNING FOR MODELLING As already mentioned, this starts at the planning stage. At this point, when sitting in your PPA session, you must be thoughtful about what the children know already, what they don’t know yet and how you are going to break

down what they don’t yet know into bite-sized chunks.

The next step then is to use some of your precious planning time to work out what you are going to say and what you are going to do to show children how to be successful in this new learning, taking into consideration the concept of 2-dimensional modelling (content and procedure).

Although it takes quite a lot of time, it really is worth doing.

You will reap the benefits when, in the classroom, you don’t have to repeat your explanations time and time again to children who have not understood the content or the procedure.

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PEDAGOGY MAKING TEACHING DECISIONS Once your explanations and models are planned it remains for you to use them in the classroom.

And this is where even the best intentions can fall flat.

Everybody knows that the school day is busy and changeable and often things happen outside of a teacher’s control, meaning there is not enough time to get through everything that has been planned. It is at this point that we must respond by thinking about which of the lesson’s components must remain and what can be left out. Explanations and modelling must not be cut; teachers should persevere with doing a good job of these two aspects as without these, moving to practice time for children will result in them being unable to complete the work.

Actually, it’s the practice time that will have to go. If this is the case, then you will need to make sure that the next lesson begins with a recap and perhaps further modelling, but that it is then given over to the practice time that children missed in the previous lesson.

This can be anathema to the teacher who still feels that a

lesson should contain three parts and should all fit neatly into the timetabled slot for that subject.

For teachers who do not see learning as a sequence but only see a succession of self-contained lessons, this will require a greater change of mindset. Also for those who are held to account for the amount of written work, or recorded work, in each lesson, this will present difficulties.

MODELLING IN ALL SUBJECTS OF THE PRIMARY CURRICULUM Another issue that presents in primary schools is that in certain subjects modelling is not given the same precedence as it is in say, maths and English. There are several reasons for this, such as: • the aforementioned lack of time in a squeezed timetable where many different curriculum subjects are vying for attention; • teachers’ own levels of expertise in subjects that they are not specialists in mean that they are less confident to model for example, the necessary brush stroke techniques that impressionist artists used;

• logistical problems such as modelling the procedures involved in sawing a piece of wood at an angle to a class of 30 children at once.

It goes without saying that modelling needs to be an important part of all teaching across the curriculum. In these wider curriculum subjects, it is probably even more important to model the processes, as they are typically practised less often. For example, a child will spend more time practising punctuating their sentences properly than they will using a compass or a map in geography.

MODELLING AT THE CENTRE OF TEACHING AND LEARNING Whatever your pedagogical views are, it’s hard to deny the importance of modelling. From the most hardcore of direct instruction proponents, to the staunch devotee of discovery learning, modelling the what and how will always be essential to a teacher’s role. We therefore need to ensure that it is given the time that it deserves.

“teachers… often find it difficult to recognise how much new learning needs to be broken down for the learner”

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EXPAND YOUR MIND ONE SUBJECT AT A TIME

40. Viewing The Curriculum As A NeverEnding Story

Curriculum is the one job that is never truly finished, so how should we approach it?

45. Learning The Language Of Mathematics

Why a common mathematical language for students and staff is vital for success.

48. Let’s Toark Abought Spelling: Palt Tough

The second installment of Neil Almond’s series on the science of teaching spelling.

52. The Case For Classics How we can weave Classics into our lessons and why we should do so.

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VIEWING THE CURRICULUM AS A NEVER-ENDING STORY Curriculum design can be a daunting and intimidating task for even the most expert subject leader. In this article, Mary Myatt breaks down the fundamentals of curriculum design so Middle and Senior Leaders can approach it with confidence and clarity.

By Mary Myatt

There’s a tendency to want to get things absolutely spot on, so here are some suggestions by way of reassurance: One: there’s no need to have everything in place for us to get cracking.

Sometimes, there’s a reluctance to make a start until all the plans are written up.

As long as there’s an overview in place, there’s no need to have all our ducks in a row before we make a start. The likelihood is that we are going to adjust the plans in the light of experience.

Beginning, as Churchill said, is half done.

Two: The plans are never more important than the pupils in front of us. There can be a temptation to plough on regardless, even if something isn’t working and if pupils haven’t truly grasped something. The plans are there to support teaching, not dictate it. If

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pupils are not learning what we intend, we need to adjust. Which leads to: Three: We need to beware the ‘curse of content coverage’. It can feel as though there is an awful amount to be taught.

But if our plans are not underpinned by concepts and big ideas, it is hard for our pupils to make connections. As Stephen Pinker says ‘disconnected facts are like unlinked pages on the web: they might as well not exist’. Ploughing through the content is not a sufficient guarantee that pupils have learnt that content unless they are able to make connections.

Four: Light touch assessments need to gauge whether what we have taught has been learnt. What we teach should be more important than mapping against multiple key performance indicators, which mostly don’t tell us anything and which can affect what we teach in order to turn our pupils ‘green’.

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Curriculum

Five: The curriculum is a never-ending story. Lots of colleagues are saying that they are not as far ahead as they would like to be on their curriculum journey. That will always be the case: there will always be something that we want to refine, ditch, add depth to. We need to enjoy the fact that curriculum is never-ending. What we are offering right now is probably good enough and it will take time for it to get better. As Andrew Percival says ‘we need to create a curriculum culture in schools’ which means we relax into the idea that curriculum work is a living, breathing process. There’s more on the free curriculum primary webinar.

Here are some of the things John Tomsett and I found when we spoke to secondary subject leaders about the curriculum in their schools: it can be hard for senior leaders because the terminology to discuss the curriculum can be intimidating; they feel that they don’t know enough about curriculum design; they might not have a thorough knowledge of the subjects they line manage.

These are some of the things we have picked up from conversations with subject leaders: they often feel that they have to reinvent the whole curriculum; they do not always have the resources they need to shape the ideal curriculum they envisage; they are sometimes given unrealistic deadlines for completing curriculum development work by senior leaders who do not know their subjects.

So, we thought it would be a good idea to explore this space. And we did it by having conversations with terrific subject leaders. We argue that the onus is on the senior leaders to make the time and space to get to know the headlines of the subjects they line manage. And to do this, they need the support of subject leaders.

“curriculum work is a living, breathing process”

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In the sessions we recorded, the subject leaders were asked

by John what they expected a student to know, understand and do by the end of key stage 3 if they had experienced a really rich, interesting and demanding curriculum. John then asks them how they get pupils started in Year 7. These are John’s question prompts:

were clear that their subjects add value to lives beyond the formal curriculum.

• With a class of Year 9s in front of you, if you have taught them a rich, challenging curriculum, what does success look like in terms of what those students know, understand, and can do in your subject?

Four: We shouldn’t be intimidated by some of the tremendous teachers and speakers who make us feel this language and understanding is normalised. Only a minority of existing middle leaders have the language being used commonly about curriculum theory and so it needs a steady, pragmatic approach if we are to meet middle leaders where they are.

• If that is your destination, where do you begin in Year 7 and how do you build up to that point?

• What would you like your senior leader line manager to know about your subject?

And this is what we found: One: That subject leaders are delighted to have the chance to talk about their subjects: a proper conversation about the ‘stuff’ they plan for their students.

Two: That individual subjects make a unique contribution to learning and all those we spoke to

Three: The subject leaders were clear that key stage 3 was much more than ‘mini key stage 4’ and there are real opportunities here for subjects to treat key stage 3 as the intellectual powerhouse of the secondary phase.

Five: As Claire Hill says ‘When you think about the vocabulary you use when discussing the curriculum with subject leaders, we need to be sensitive to the individual subject leader’s knowledge levels.

It is all too easy to use curriculumrelated vocabulary that intimidates colleagues. Across any school or trust there will be a significant variation in terms of where different departments are in understanding how to develop their curriculum. Whilst you might have some common language around core knowledge, hinterland knowledge

and disciplinary knowledge etc., how you address that in different subjects varies depending on where that subject is in developing their curriculum.’

In summary • Our subject takes students beyond qualifications – we are educating them for life • If the curriculum is so important, then we need time for collaborative curriculum development • Developing the curriculum is intellectually rewarding work • We are not developing the curriculum for the regulator – we are developing the curriculum for our students • The principles of each subject apply to primary and secondary • Curriculum development is a never-ending process.

And that’s why we have called our book ‘Huh’ named after the Egyptian god of everlasting things.

You can watch a recording of John and Mary’s webinar here via the free membership.

“Ploughing through the content is not a sufficient guarantee that pupils have learnt that content unless they are able to make connections”

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Maths

LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS Reasoning in mathematics depends on a sound understanding of mathematical language. In this article, Shannen Doherty explains how she advocates teaching this to students throughout the Maths curriculum.

By Shannen Doherty

We live in a world full of TV, tablets, and screens galore. This must be affecting children’s vital early years experiences. Anecdotally, I have seen children starting reception far behind their peers when it comes to language.

We’d be fools to ignore the fact that some children do not have a linguistically rich early experience. Adding covid to the mix will surely have had a knock-on effect, too. Children have missed out on the chance

to socialise and talk and practise conversing, all of which support their development. So, when it comes to using mathematical language in school, they need support. It doesn’t just happen overnight!

Mathematical language is the means through which we communicate our ideas and our thinking. It’s crucial to the learning of our students. The National Curriculum mentions mathematical language in their

aims, “reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language”. As far as I’m concerned, teaching mathematical language is the key to unlocking reasoning. I am a firm believer that children need explicit vocabulary teaching and structured language in mathematics. We need to take a structured approach. Learning vocabulary can’t be left to chance.

“Why did we start using ‘addend’ to talk about the numbers in addition?”

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I was recently asked, “Why did we start using ‘addend’ to talk about the numbers in addition?” But why wouldn’t we?

solidify their understanding of the concepts they are explaining.”

Whenever we have this debate, I hear two justifications:

Explicit teaching of mathematic vocabulary is essential. It’s not enough for new and technical language to be learnt through exposure. They need to say the word, repeat the word, clap out the syllables, look at the etymology or root of the word, find similar words, read it in context, use it in context, revisit and retrieve the word. It’s not a two-minute job at the start of a lesson, it’s part of an extended journey that we guide our pupils through in a careful manner.

1) If children are learning phoneme, grapheme, digraph and trigraph in phonics then why shouldn’t they learn addend, minuend, subtrahend, etc?

2) Children remember the names of all the dinosaurs so they can learn the parts of an equation, too.

Both are obviously true. Children clearly do have the capacity to learn new words, but they also have a thirst for it. They love learning new and interesting vocabulary.

However, I can’t help thinking we’re missing the point when we give these justifications. We aren’t teaching mathematical language just because children can learn new words. We’re teaching it because they should learn these words. Mathematical language strengthens understanding and facilitates mathematical thinking.

If we want them to be fluent with the mathematics, they need to be fluent with the language, too. We’d be doing our pupils a disservice if we didn’t teach them the words that could be the difference between solidifying their understanding and their explanations or not.

In Thinking Deeply about Primary Mathematics, Kieran Mackle says, “When mathematical vocabulary is taught to pupils in advance of their use and they are given the opportunity to familiarise themselves with their essence over time, we give them permission to not only increase the accuracy of their explanations but to

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So how do we do it?

But before you can do any of that, you need to decide which vocabulary to teach. Less is more. Think about the language that is going to have the biggest impact on understanding and reasoning and start there. You also need to consider when you’re going to teach it. When in their mathematical journey will they learn a word? When will they hear it again?

And then you need to ensure that the language being used across the school is consistent. If one teacher is only using factor and product but another is only using multiplier, multiplicand and product then there’s work to be done. Teachers need to be taught which words to use, and everyone needs to know when they’ve been introduced and when they come up again.

Once the vocabulary is taught, we need to structure the language beyond that. Stem sentences are the way to do this. They are integral to teaching mathematical reasoning. A stem sentence provides the bones of verbal and written explanations. It’s a mantra for a concept.

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Maths

The National Centre for Excellence in the of Teaching Mathematics (NCETM) have worked on stem sentences for years and these can be found throughout their Professional Development materials, or spines.

We are time poor as teachers so I would highly recommend using these spines to plan and to find high quality stem sentences.

Stem sentences serve several purposes. They lay the foundations for mathematical thinking and reasoning; they provide the structure to the language so our pupils can focus on the mathematics; they emphasise using the correct language; they provide a pathway to making generalisations; and they support students in seeing the underlying structures of the mathematics at hand.

When teaching a new concept, the stem sentence should appear throughout the learning sequence.

For example, if you are working on

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the concept of ‘same difference’ then you will want something like ‘I have increased my minuend by ___ so I must also increase my subtrahend by ___ to keep the difference the same.’ or ‘I’ve subtracted ____ from the minuend and the subtrahend so the difference stays the same.’

It’s important that the stem sentence continues throughout your lesson. Each time you move onto a different example, the whole class should say the sentence together while filling in the gaps. This repetition ensures each child is hearing and saying the reasoning behind a concept again and again.

As you move through a concept and want to challenge the children further, you can begin to gradually remove certain parts of the stem sentence, so the children become more independent in their thinking and reasoning. I have found that colour-coding parts of the sentence and gradually

removing significant words but leaving a coloured line behind is a good way to scaffold their independence.

Sometimes teachers will bemoan pupils whose explanations go around the houses, but just like anything else we teach, mathematical thinking and reasoning needs careful modelling and scaffolding to support our pupils through their learning journey. Explicit teaching of vocabulary and stem sentences is essential to this. It can’t be left to chance.

“When teaching a new concept, the stem sentence should appear throughout the learning sequence.”

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CURRICULUM

LET’S TOARK ABOUGHT SPELLING: PALT TOUGH

For many, the teaching of spelling can seem like a mammoth task, with no clear way to begin. Neil offers his suggestions about how spelling can be taught methodically and efficiently in Part 2 of his series on spelling.

By Neil Almond

In the November 2021 edition of HWRK Magazine, I offered readers an extremely brief tour and overview of modern English, tracing it back to its ancestral roots of Proto Indo-European and the cocktail of geopolitical and social influences that have impacted the language over many years to its modern-day incarnation. In this article, I want to talk more about the structure of the English language, and start to appreciate how it is that we may begin teaching spelling so that it sticks.

As mentioned in the previous article, English is such a hard language to read and spell is because it has a deep orthography or complex code.

Depending on your accent there are approximately 44 sounds that make up every word in the English language In English there are multiple ways to spell the 44 sounds of the English system - around 176 common spellings to be precise. In primary schools, this process begins formally in Reception through phonics lessons (instruction in phonics, whether systematic and synthetic or not, is any attempt to explain to anyone what sound is being represented by a singular or collection of abstract symbols) and, depending

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on which phonics scheme your school uses, will depend on when this type on instruction ends and how many spelling alternatives are taught.

Phonics is also the main method by which students are beginning to learn to decode; I use this word purposefully as it encompasses what is rarely understood outside of education: writing systems are codes where the act of taking abstract symbols off the page and converting those into the correct sounds is the act of cracking the code. The act of writing a string of abstract symbols (which we call letters), with spaces between them when required, is the act of writing the code.

Understanding this simple principle is one of the keys to understanding how to spell effectively and how to support student in their spelling. This means that to spell (and read) most words in the English language a mastery of the 176 common spellings is required to represent the approximate 44 sounds used within the language.

Along with understanding letters are used to code sounds, other structural knowledge about the English language that is important to know to teach and learn to spell effectively include the following:

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1) A sound can be represented by 1,2,3 or 4 letters.

2) One sound can be represented with different spellings.

3) The same spelling can represent different sounds (known as code overlap).

Let’s look at this in practice by looking at the incorrect spellings of the title of this article and the previous one. For this, words between two slashes represent the sound and the letters between two angle brackets will represent spelling.

Let’s tork abawt spelling Let’s Toark Abought Spelling: Palt tough Before we analyse the words in to see how I have made use of the structural knowledge, let’s look at the number of sounds in the words that have been spelt incorrectly. ‘Talk’ is comprised of 3 sounds, ‘about’ spelt with 4 sounds, ‘part’ with 3 sounds and ‘two’ with 2 sounds. Across all the words within the title, you can see how a sound has been represented by a different number of letters - /t/ has been represented by one letter <t>, /or/ has been spelt with 3 letters <oar> (as in ‘boar’), /aw/ has been represented by 4 letters <ough> and /ar/ is represented by the spelling <al> (as used in the word half).

That one sound can be represented with different spellings can be seen when comparing the two titles above. /or/ is represented by <or> and by <oar> and /aw/ is represented by <aw> and <ough>.

Finally, that the same spelling can represent different sounds can be seen by the spelling <ough> where it is used to represent the spelling of the sound /aw/ and /oo/ in ‘about’ and ‘two’.

From this, any activity used to promote learning to spell should enforce those principles.

Therefore, I am personally sceptical about activities that force students to look at words as ‘whole’ units as if each word is a distinct picture themselves. Such activities include the ever popular ‘look, say, cover, write, check’ and looking at word shapes. In these activities

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students would have had a group of words to learn and then use place the correct word into different height boxes that matches the ‘shape’ of the word.

It is unclear, at least from a popular spelling program that recommends this activity, how it is supposed to aid with spelling.

Before explaining a spelling activity that I think is worthwhile, it is important to know that I think the main purpose of spelling lessons is not to teach students how to spell certain words (though naturally this is a consequence of such lessons) but to make the complexities and the structural knowledge of English spelling code as transparent as possible.

It is not possible to teach students how to spell every word in the English language; it is folly to try and do so as it would take up for too much time.

Instead, lessons should be giving students tools by which they are likely to spell unknown words correctly.

What activities do I recommend that students do to help them become better spellers? As Daniel Willingham has told us, we only remember what we think about. Any activity needs to get students thinking carefully (and ideally multiple times) about spellings.

Phonemes (sounds) are the basis of our language, so it makes sense to get students thinking about the sounds that they hear and relate this to the spellings that they know.

Students in Year 2 and above will be expected to read and spell polysyllabic words. So help to syllabify words and say these with a ‘spelling voice’ where you avoid saying the words with unstressed vowels. For example, if I

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wanted to students to spell the word amusement, I would show them how we can split the word into three syllables by focusing on the number of vowel sounds (a|muse|ment) and ensure that I stress the initial /a/ sound instead of sounding it as an /uh/ sound (or schwa, as linguists call it). Getting students to finger clap each syllable and saying it in a spelling voice further helps students as they break down longer words into more manageable chunks.

Once students have practiced this several times, when they come to try to spell a new word independently, the teacher now has a few tools at their disposal.

Instead of just providing the spelling for the students, teachers can ask the students which syllable and which sound within that syllable they are struggling with. This has the benefit of students seeing that they simply do not know how to spell a certain sound contained within the word rather than the whole word itself.

Getting students to think about spelling in terms of the syllables within a word, and the number of sounds within those syllables is a good bet for getting students to think hard about the structure of the words at a meaningful level when compared to ‘word shape’ or ‘look, cover, write, check’ activities.

One way to get students to practice the skills above is using an activity I have called ‘word inspection’. The activity involves a list of words that, importantly, are arranged by sound. In the case of the example below, they all contain a different way to spell the /ae/ sound.

Instead of just writing each word out several times, first students are asked to identify the number of syllables and write the word again marking each syllable. Next, they are asked to identify the number sounds in each word. Having already identified the number of syllables previously, this step is naturally scaffolded by the proceeding one. The final step is to identify which letters spell the target sound. In the

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word ‘neighbour’, you can see that it is the <eigh> spelling of /ae/. Once the sheet has been completed, the students will see all the common ways that /ae/ can be spelt along with some rare ways to spell /ae/ but in common words (<aigh> is only used in straight and <ea> is used in only a handful of words). It is useful for students to know this, as it limits the ways that a sound would be spelled.

1. This example would be used in UKS2. it can be adapted in a number of ways by including more than one target sound or by providing fewer spelling alternatives depending on the year group.

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As mentioned earlier, the purpose of the above is not necessarily to get students to spell that particular set of words correctly, but to get the student thinking carefully about what they can do the next time that they want to spell a word. A student who wants to spell ‘investigate’ will no longer ask a teacher how to spell the word in its entirety, but instead they will ask the teacher how to spell a particular sound within the word. Taking this one step further would be if the student asks if it’s the <ai> or the <a-e> spelling. That is when you know that students are truly cracking the spelling code, and I will look at how we can potentially get to that point with students next time in Part 3.

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THE CASE FOR CLASSICS? Why should anybody study Classics at all? It’s arguable that we all should, according to Libby Isaac.

By Libby Isaac

Last month I was lucky enough to host Professor Dame Mary Beard in an interview on Teacher Talk Radio. I teach Humanities at a Secondary School and more recently I’ve been working with the Historical Association and consulting with key members of staff within Primary Schools. Working with these individuals, combined with my own passion for Classics has really made me think about how and more importantly, why we should be exposing our students to classical civilisations within the Secondary school curriculum.

I attended the University of Wales, Swansea, where I studied Ancient History after studying Modern History at school. I remember vividly when we were reading the Odyssey or the Iliad, my friend sat next to me would be off in her own world, laughing and giggling as she read the Latin. She explained to me that certain parts were very funny as they were incredibly rude. However, this was usually lost in translation for me, as I could only access the literature in English. But even though I felt somewhat of an imposter, I knew I wanted to study

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the classical world because I knew it contributed to my own understanding of our culture.

Mary Beard explained in her interview that universities have now become much better at teaching about the classical world. Every university in the country will teach Latin or Greek from scratch; they do not require you to have studied a language. Primary schools are also getting this right; their curriculums are setting students up from a very young age. There are exciting initiatives both at Primary and University level but little at the Secondary level. So, how can we do this within a Secondary school setting?

The Ancient World is not just for students who learn Greek and Latin at school. Neither is it about burying the past. We use it to help understand the present. I would argue that we need to include references to the Ancient World in today’s Humanities curriculum. Mary Beard used the example of talking about slavery in Ancient Rome and Greece, then moving on to referencing it in the modern world. We can use the classics, as a way of opening up debate with our students, about the topics they consider important. This can work incredibly

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Classics

well in alignment with a schools PSHE curriculum, which when delivered in the right way sets the tone of a school’s culture.

An example of how you can reference the classical world when delivering a PSHE session is to look at the topic of consent.

It might be that you work in a Secondary School where students are using horrific phrases like “I will rape you.” Or where they have huge misconceptions with regard to the understanding of consent.

Some staff when faced with a PSHE lesson around sensitive issues such as consent are faced with fear and dread as the delivery of this topic is beyond their comfort zone. You may feel as though you are untrained, underqualified, or too inexperienced to facilitate this conversation and important topic. However, I would argue that references from the Classical world can support

you here.

Take for example the concept of rape culture as “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalised and excused in the media and popular culture.”

(Marshall University Women’s centre). The culture of Ancient Greece certainly qualifies under this definition, as women did not have full access to consensual sexual relations, fostering a culture of rape. A study of Athenian Laws further highlights institutionalised inequality: any case which included rape would need to be filtered through the men in the victim’s life, giving men the power to decide what would happen.

Such examples from Ancient Greece, within your PSHE lessons about consent, allow for safe discussion with your students and you can open up

conversations with students using Classical examples to raise their modern expectations and awareness around the topic. For example take this quote from Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, “If against my will he takes me by force……….I’ll be a lousy lay.”

(Ar. Lys. 246-249). This is where the wives of Greece go on a sex strike to force their husbands to end the Peloponnesison war. In their oath to one another, they treat rape as a real possibility, but gloss over any seriousness by describing resistance as merely being “a lousy lay.” Subordination is treated as inevitability. You could use such an example to explore answers to questions like, “Should these characters accept subordination as inevitable?” “Is it right that rape in the Ancient World is regarded as normal?”, then moving onto “What would or should happen if you took someone by force in the modern world?”

“I knew I wanted to study the classical world because I knew it contributed to my own understanding of our culture”

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CURRICULUM

Another example might include, from Greek mythology, where it shows that consent was not necessarily within the marriage bed. The story of Persephone and Hades is about a young girl who is kidnapped by her uncle to be his wife. In this story Zeus had promised his daughter to marry his brother Hades without the permission or knowledge of either his daughter or his wife. Parallels with forced marriage in countries across the globe could be explored here.

Another example where we can reference the classical world and use within our current curriculums would be through the discussion of politics. The Ancient World offers superb examples of this, which make for amazing comparisons as well as promoting discussions about democracy.

In 427BCE the people of Athens voted, democratically, to put to death the entire male population of the town of Mytilone and to throw into slavery the women

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and children, totalling thousands.

This was their punishment for changing sides during the Great War between Athens and Sparta. It was a brutal decision, but it was never executed as the voters got cold feet the next day. This opens up dialogue about what democracy means: How should democracy work? How democratic is our current system?

Slavery, race, empire, theatre, tragedy, are more examples of mindopening topics and often feature heavily in Arts and Humanities curriculums. Megan Mansworth talks about teaching to the top and exposing our students to language and issues they can interrogate.

This is how we embed the classical world into our Secondary school curriculums. We use what we have today and tie it to references to the Ancient World, expanding students’ literary and historical knowledge with their ethical and political outlooks today.

We do not need specialised Classics teachers for this, or

even require space to teach Classics independently within the curriculum, although this would also be wonderful. We just need to use our already existing curriculums to make reference to this Ancient World and to build upon the work that is taking place at Primary Schools up and down the country. Classics are such an incredible and safe space to explore issues within a Secondary school. We can tackle highlysensitive topics such as politics, slavery and consent (among many others) within this safe forum and by referencing the Ancient World we are less likely to unwittingly cause offence. A Classics curriculum creates richer and deeper conversations. Not only do students gain hugely from this, we as teachers do as well.

“We use what we have today and tie it to references to the Ancient World, expanding students’ literary and historical knowledge with their ethical and political outlooks today.”

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58. The Secret Lives Of Tutors

How the tutoring industry impacts the lives of teachers.

60. Is Gatsby Really So Great?

Why CEIAG requires a careful rethink.

62. What Makes School Trips So Precious?

An emotional reminder of why trips are crucial for our students (and perhaps us too).

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EXPERIENCE

THE SECRET LIVES OF TUTORS Why do we have so many teachers turning to tutoring, and why don’t we talk about it?

by Lauran Hampshire-Dell

Given that tutors have been used since the Roman era, it seems bizarre to me that it’s taken a 21st century global pandemic to make it front page news.

Almost every teacher I know has taken on some form of private tutoring during their career, and plenty more – myself included – have moved away altogether from the pressures of mainstream education into full-time tuition.

In 2019 The Tutors’ Association estimated that there as many as 100,000 private tutors working in the UK. This number is phenomenal, and brings with it an avalanche of questions: why are so many teachers taking on private tuition alongside their already hectic schedules?

Why don’t they talk about it? And why aren’t we working harder to bridge the gap between teacher/tutor relationships?

Let’s take a look.

HEY… MUST BE THE MONEY? Undeniably, money is a significant factor.

Despite working through hugely unpredictable circumstances over the last two academic years, teachers found out in the summer that the Government would be not be rewarding the sector with a pay increase this year, a choice described as ‘an absolute insult’ by Geoff Barton, and widely criticised across unions and leaders. With the cost of living rising ever higher, it’s completely unsurprising that teachers are looking elsewhere to top up their salaries in a relatively low effort, convenient and flexible way.

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starting salaries, to budgets and TLR payments. A recent survey by the NAHT showed that a massive 26% of school leaders are anticipating their school budget being in deficit this academic year, and with staffing being the biggest expense, it’s easy to understand why the cuts would be made there first.

This is most likely to mean that departments and roles are restructured to make ends meet, but sometimes it’s those same TLRs keeping a family warm and fed. I spoke to a London teacher who has recently faced a similar situation: ‘of course I understand that having an in-department TLR was a luxury - my role is important but not a necessity - but once I started to figure out how much that would impact my wages, I had two choices: try to move schools for a higher salary, which I’m not guaranteed to find at the moment, or get on Facebook and advertise my tuition services. It means I see my family even less, but it means they’ve got a cupboard full of food’.

Alongside general living, unavoidable costs such as childcare (which can leave even highly paid middle and senior leaders with little to spare at the end of the month) have seen some teachers leave the classroom altogether. The money saved on childcare and topped up with tuition money can mean that, if anything, teachers end up with the same money for significantly less stress and significantly more time with their families.

These topics are uncomfortable to talk about, and are hardly morning coffee conversation starters. We work in such an important industry, one seen as well paid and ‘recession proof’, and it can

be embarrassing to admit that you don’t have enough cash left over to go out at the weekend. Then, as if all of these financial concerns aren’t enough, teachers tempted to turn to tuition may face the judgement of their colleagues too.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET? A quick social media search hints at some of the reasons that we don’t talk about private tutors much in the staff room: clearly, the two factions are divided, and both sides feel attacked.

Teachers report feeling undermined; some interpret the need for a tutor as a sign that their teaching is perhaps seen as not being ‘good enough’; others feel as if they are in conflict with the approaches and feedback being given to students leading to unexpected outcomes in the classroom. Similarly, tutors report being treated with disdain: common complaints include students being told that their tutor is wrong or untrustworthy because they aren’t a ‘proper’ teacher. Tutors have reported being called ‘lazy’ or told they ‘can’t hack the classroom’ alongside hearing or seeing other derogatory comments being made about them, instigating a passive tug-of-war sense of ownership over a student in which every party is left feeling hurt.

Rather than forming a spectrum though, these concerns become cyclical: clearly neither side feels trusted by the other in order to produce the best results for students, thus leading to a sense of competition and encouraging criticism.

A teacher’s frustration is understandable here; however, with class sizes ever @hwrk_magazine

growing, absence rates high and unpredictable, and the severity of gaps in student knowledge and ability as a consequence of the pandemic as yet unknown, teachers can’t possibly be expected to do and fix all, and tuition that is bonded tightly to in-school lessons offers a powerful opportunity to support both classroom teachers and students.

A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER? Although there aren’t many silver linings to the impact of COVID-19 on education, it has blown the door wide open on discussions about tutoring, how effective it really is, and how it can be best used.

The recent study by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) suggests that regular structured 1:1 tuition sessions run over 10 weeks, led by a teacher, and closely linked to classroom teaching can add upto +6 months’ progress with primary school students, and +4 months in secondary school

students. Small group tuition too is impactful, particularly when led by a good teacher, which could serve as a positive reminder that rather than being ‘has beens’, former-teachers-turnedtutors are still some of the most skilled professionals out there. Effective and cohesively planned tuition is potentially incredible in terms of student impact and outcomes, and provides a perfect opportunity for teachers and tutors to start to work together.

Schemes such as the National Tutoring Programme also offer the chance for bridges to be built, particularly in cases where the school strongly leads, communicates and collaborates with the tutors delivering the additional lessons. Plenty of schools have reported a positive experience with NTP partners, and it could be that this is the very seed that needs to be planted in order for tutors to be welcomed back into a school environment.

FIXING A HOLE Rather than teachers hiding what is

clearly a widespread side-hustle, or wondering if the use of a tutor suggests their classroom practice is not good enough, I think there’s an opportunity here to see tutors as the Polyfilla of education: hopefully the foundations are strong, and it won’t be needed, but if some repairs do need to take place, there’s a reliable resource the exhausted builder can rely upon to be there and get the job done when needed.

The problems around tutoring shouldn’t be focused upon from within the education system: they are indicative of all of those making choices about it from the outside. It says so much about us as a collective that, even after seeing potentially hundreds of students all day, teachers don’t stop - they go out and do it all again once the school gate is closed. It also shows that often teachers who leave the classroom don’t leave education; thousands still have that spark that made them enter in the first place, and they still care about making a difference to student’s lives… and ultimately, isn’t that what it’s all about, regardless of whether you’re in your classroom or their kitchen?

“teachers end up with the same money for significantly less stress and significantly more time with their families”

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EXPERIENCE

IS GATSBY REALLY SO GREAT? What does the phrase “a good job” mean? How can CEIAG guidance in schools help students to aspire towards and obtain such a job? Clive Hill presents his view in his latest article for HWRK Magazine…

By Clive Hill

Careers advice has changed over the last decade, and despite the push from stakeholders involved in education we still see lower levels of engagement and success in higher education from those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. As a sector we seek to address the inequality within society by steering students towards university, and miss the real aim of careers advice.

The Gatsby benchmarks do little to address this because they fail to address the needs of communities in areas of social deprivation. Delivering an effective careers programme in these areas needs to be more than a box-ticking exercise for Ofsted.

In 2013, Sir John Holman was commissioned with leading the Gatsby Foundation’s report on good career guidance. The aim of the report was to produce firm actions which had the ability to improve careers education, information and guidance (CEIAG) in England. Upon the report’s completion, the Good Career Guidance report presented “The eight Gatsby benchmarks of Good Career Guidance”; more commonly known as ‘the Gatsby benchmarks’ that would establish a good CEIAG guidance provision in England when measured by international standards. The Gatsby Benchmarks have been fully embedded into the 2019 School Inspection Handbook where Ofsted inspectors assess whether a school is “providing an effective careers programme in 6 0 // H W R K M AG A Z I N E // JA N UA RY 2 0 2 2

line with the government’s statutory guidance on careers advice…”. These eight benchmarks require consideration of their efficacy themselves. While they form the framework in which schools operate, due to the nature of Ofsted inspections, they are not all fit for purpose without consideration to the impact they have on schoolcommunities.

Current research and literature linking CEIAG and social inequality is aimed at addressing the needs of individual students within a cohort. In many communities in England and Wales the socioeconomic demographics of a cohort present inherent challenges for schools serving them.

Teach First, the Education Endowment Foundation, and Careers and Enterprise Company have all carried out extensive reports to look at the efficacy of CEIAG education. While these are comprehensive in their nature, there is an absence of advice produced by these reports on how CEIAG education should be structured in order to be effective in areas of social deprivation.

CEIAG is the unfortunately pragmatic bedfellow of the education system.

I’m a firm believer that education has its own worth, and should be enjoyed by all; I’m also a realist. The narrative around those living with social disadvantage comes from a middle-class positionality.

Literature from organisations such as Teach First uses terms such as “good job/employment” to address social disadvantage. Successive governments have argued for universities to address disparity regarding access to degrees for these students. But the problem with the terms used is that without firm definitions agreed, the lenses through which those terms are read are not the same for all people.

Yet, we have a definition, from the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices and the DBEI’s Good Work Plan. I believe that by adopting these principles we can all have a shared vision of what a “good job” looks like - good pay; participation and progression; wellbeing, safety and security; and voice and autonomy. By doing this we can prevent students from disengaging from education because they feel that a trade or apprenticeship is the best-suited route for them, rather than university, when it may not be.

This is not to say we shouldn’t be opening up the world of graduate careers to students in these areas. In fact it is crucial to present all the options available to students and their families (working with parents and carers is critical for real success), so that they can make truly informed choices about their futures.

Schools that are invested in breaking the cycle of social disadvantage need to ensure that the opportunities to engage with employers and universities are filled with @hwrk_magazine

“CEIAG needs to start earlier; much earlier than the statutory Y8 proposed by Gatsby”

purpose – simply putting on an external speaker doesn’t pass muster. Students need to be sold the point of these sessions. All too often these are put on KS4, after options have been taken, and the boat has been missed regarding ‘informed choices’.

CEIAG needs to start earlier; much earlier than the statutory Y8 proposed by Gatsby. Primary schools have a part to play in this; there’s evidence that student career choices are affected by their knowledge of employment opportunities though limited networking opportunities in their social circles; this is also a great place to start challenging stereotypes.

This broadening of horizons needs to be carried on in secondaries, where engagement needs to be seamless right from the beginning of Y7.

Obviously this leaves those working in education in a difficult position. We HWRKMAGAZINE.CO.UK

have the evidence to show that graduate careers provide the best opportunities for social mobility, positively affecting health, life expectancy and life-time earnings. However, we also risk removing student voice, and damaging self-concept by not respecting the choices of the full range of students and families in our communities. I would argue that there is a time to park our inner-academic egos, and understand that our role is more than passing on a passion for our subject, but also to enable those in our charge to make informed decisions regarding their futures.

Admittedly, I do have a personal perspective here; I was one of the students from a socially deprived background – a living example of one of these statistics. I was written off at secondary school, as I wasn’t someone that was destined for university. I dropped out of sixth-form to take up an

engineering apprenticeship in the Army.

I’m a “black-hand trade”, that trade was key to me changing my outlook on learning and aspirations. It was only this year that during a presentation to a group of teachers that I checked myself as I said “I’ve never been an academic…”; this was a blatant lie.

Three degrees, one of which involved research into the efficacy of careers provision in areas of social deprivation, were there on the board for me to reflect on.

Yet, right there at the start of it all was seventeen-year old me, learning how the internal combustion engine worked, and wanting to be the best mechanical engineer that I could be. I just needed to find my first steps in believing I could be really good at something – this is the role of the classroom teacher in CEIAG; to nurture the drive and passion of students and help them make the choices that will gain them “a good job”.

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EXPERIENCE

WHAT MAKES SCHOOL TRIPS SO PRECIOUS? You might have clear idea of what you want students to take from their experiences on a school trip, but it rarely turns out the way you planned, explains Kate Jones.

By Kate Jones

School trips are one of the aspects of school life that have been most impacted by the global pandemic. It can be exciting to venture outside of the classroom and make memorable experiences with students in a unique setting. But organising and leading a trip can be stressful with administration, risk assessments and the added pressure of constantly trying to account for a large group of children in an unfamiliar place, or even a foreign country.

There will also be many Early Career Teachers who have yet to experience a school trip as a teacher and are looking forward to the opportunity, when it is safe to do so. But school trips aren’t always remembered for the reasons we think when we plan them. Early Career Teachers might want to bear that in mind.

to escort us around the city. They were local and told us fascinating stories that only someone who lived in Berlin through recent years could share.

It wasn’t just Berlin though, it’s fair to describe our tour guide as “interesting” too. As we stopped at one point it appeared our guide had begun arguing with another guide. They were speaking German and at first I reassured my students they weren’t arguing (after all, we couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other). However, it quickly became very apparent that we were wrong. The students watch open-mouthed and we weren’t sure what to do! After deciding to move on and take the students with us, our guide did eventually catch up with us. We can only assume that the conflict was resolved!

If you ask any teacher who has led or supported a field trip, whether that be local or international; they will have a story or two to tell. The last school trip I supported was an A Level History trip to Berlin and below are some of the tales from that experience.

Once home and despite all the rich history and stunning architecture, our students kept recalling (and of course exaggerating) the story of our tour guide ‘kicking off ’! That often happens on a school trip, sometimes the most unexpected event becomes the most memorable, whether we as teachers like it or not.

Although the trip was led by three History teachers and we had all been to Berlin before, we were still unfamiliar with the area so we arranged for an experienced tour guide

It’s very likely that someone (student or teacher or both!) will at some point be unwell on a trip. This could be due to the travel itself or perhaps eating or drinking something different but it is quite

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common. In Berlin, we travelled around via the U-Bahn (the public transport system), where I was sat next to a student who had been feeling slightly unwell all morning; unsure of what was causing it but determined to carry on and not miss any of the planned activities.

The student confided in me that they felt they were going to be sick. Naively I asked if they could wait until we got off the U-Bahn, but they simply couldn’t.

Not to fear, as I had a spare plastic carrier bag to hand, ready for exactly this type of emergency! The student sat next to me, leaned across and vomited straight into the bag I was holding. Sadly, the bag was nowhere near as strong as I hoped and it immediately split, with all the contents of that bag covering me. It was already stressful and so embarrassing for the student, so I put my brave face on and insisted it wasn’t a problem. Fast forward a few years and that same student looks back at their experience and laughs. But, perhaps more importantly, they gained an appreciation of their teacher’s capacity for supportive smiles in such an unpleasant situation for us both.

School trips are of course, first and foremost, about providing educational experiences. In Berlin we went to Sachsenhausen memorial where we read about some of the horrific experiences and treatment that so many people endured both during and post World War 2.

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“perhaps more importantly, they gained an appreciation of their teacher’s capacity for supportive smiles in such an unpleasant situation”

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EXPERIENCE At one point, I was stood next to a student as we were reading about children who had been kept prisoners at concentration camps. The details really were heartbreaking. I felt a tear run down my cheek and as looked to my side I could see one of my students crying too. We didn’t say much to each other but it was a touching moment that we shared, where we both felt comfortable enough to express our sadness in one another’s company. As is often the case on school trips, students get to see another, usually much more private, side to their teachers and vice-versa. This was ours.

The pandemic has put a temporary halt to trips, but in the future, whenever that may be, I think both students and teachers will gain a renewed appreciation, cherishing an invaluable experience that has been taken away from us in recent years.

“sometimes the most unexpected event becomes the most memorable, whether we as teachers like it or not”

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