Halloween Edition of Teaching & Learning Magazine

Welcome to Philips High School’s Teaching and Learning Magazine – Oct 2012 - Sharing ideas with teachers!

What to do when boys fart and other stories!

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Welcome Welcome to the first ever Philips High School Teaching & Learning magazine!! I hope you will read and enjoy the informative articles in here and use them to keep up-to-date on new and exciting initiatives in the classroom. I am hoping to produce the magazine regularly and I would love it if any staff who have the urge to put pen to paper, please do so and I will happily include your articles in future editions.

Any suggestions on content are more than welcome as this is a shared magazine intended to be a usable reference for everyone.

After just half a term, it has been a real pleasure to see all that we have achieved in only 7 short weeks – WAIL, 2 stars and a wish, lesson stamps being used on exercise books, seating plans, the new style lesson plan being used effectively, sharing of good practice, teachers seeing each other teach, after school training sessions, workshops being held and the use of the ‘Teaching & Learning’ drop down area on e-portal with lots of excellent recommendations for us all to use! What a FANTASTIC start to our academic year! We are all working really hard to make Philips High School the best it can be and I want to thank you all for your help in trying to achieve this.

Happy reading and Happy Half term!!

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Contents 1.

This much I know about teaching disengaged 15 year old boys – Page 4

2.

A list of popular websites every teacher should know – Page 7

3.

What Ofsted Say They Want – Page 10

4.

How to move your lessons from good to outstanding – Page 12

5.

Children Learn Twice as Fast if they’re banned from raising hands in class – Page 15

6.

The ‘washing hands’ of Learning: Think, Pair, Share – Page 17

7.

Ofsted arrive! – Page 19

8.

The number one bit of classroom kit: Mini whiteboards – Page 22

9.

Computer games can dramatically boost children’s exam results – Page 24

10. Making Feedback Stick – Page 25

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This much I know about…teaching disengaged 15 year old boys!

Posted on Twitter October 6, 2012 by johntomsett

I have been a teacher of English for 24 years and this much I know about teaching disengaged 15 year old boys (most, if not all, of which will be obvious).

Eighteen months ago we withdrew 14 C/D borderline disengaged Year 10 boys from their English classes and I taught them. It was a win-win – they stopped disrupting others and they made real progress.

Relationships are everything. Fullan says, The single factor common to successful change is that relationships improve. If relationships improve, [things] get better. If relationships remain the same or get worse, ground is lost. Invest lots of time in developing relationships with each boy. Get to know about them personally, so that you have something to discuss with them during those idle moments when they are queuing at the door waiting for the change of lesson, or when you meet them round school.

Boys fart. A lot. Just don’t react. Or if you do, shout Doorknob! dead quick. That stops it. See below for full explanation.

Laugh with them and let them laugh at you. One day mid-lesson I was singing Lovin’ You by Minnie Riperton (yes, I know that sounds incredible) and they were giggling. I challenged them to name the artist; if they could I pledged I would buy them a copy of Call of Duty 6 each, at £40 a throw, due to be released that week.

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After some ridiculous guessing, Jordan said that his gran often plays that song and that he thought it was something like Minnie Rip-ton. It took a whole week before he admitted he’d looked it up on his phone, and mobiles are banned at our school.

Know their culture. The fact that I knew who John Cena was and how to do a choke-slam was awesomely good in their eyes.

Trust them. I found this quotation from Seneca in Clive Stafford-Smith’s own This much I know in the Observer magazine: The first step towards making someone trustworthy is to trust them. Choose your moment and use the phrase, I’m going to trust you to do this, looking directly into their eyes. It works.

On some things you have to compromise. I know it encourages learned helplessness, but just buy a stack of biros and don’t get precious if you lose a load.

No matter what the subject, get them talking. We all have a story to tell. They love to debate a subject. As a one off, sit them round a dining-style table and give them a paper plate and ask them to write down one person they’d like to invite to have a curry. And then have a group discussion about who would be on a shortlist of six; works every time. And if they can talk about their work but cannot write about it, use a dictaphone whilst they’re telling you about it; the transcripts are magical.

Give them structure and establish routines. For instance, make finding their work as easy as possible. Even if you are the guardian of their work 99% of the time and you rarely let it out of your sight, that’s OK in the long run, because at least they’ll have their notes to revise from in May of Year 11.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever diverge publicly from believing that every single one of them will get a minimum of a grade C. Not once.

Don’t bother setting homework whose completion is essential. Doling out punishment for incomplete homework detracts from the precious time you have with them in class when you can influence what they do and how they think. They complete homework badly, if at all, and then you waste time writing in their planners at the beginning of the next lesson when a sparky start is crucial if they are going to learn anything. Set extension homework, having made sure all the essentials are covered in lesson time.

Don’t drive on with something just because there is a specification to get through when it’s clear you are draining them. It is crucial you do something light5

hearted and refreshing for an hour instead. If you don’t have a break, the consequences are dire.

I know it’s unbelievably obvious, but know your sport. Of course I support Manchester United – I was born in Sussex. When we lost the league to City at the end of last season, I walked into the library for our lesson, Monday period 1, and the boys were standing in front of the newspaper rack pretending to read the centre pages of all the papers; every light-blue sports back page faced me in welcome.

Don’t give them out individual copies if you are analysing texts – use a single copy on the board so you know who’s looking at what.

Feed them a lot. Stupidly, it took me ages to work this one out. I knew my own son wasn’t worth talking to if he was remotely hungry; when I made the connection I threw all the cake I could find at the problem. It was sponsored by our Raising Achievement fund. There was a moment, as I walked in with a tray of chocolate Butterfly cakes, when Louis said, Oh Sir, I’m really gonna work hard from now on.

It took just a tray of Butterfly cakes to change his behaviours which had been ingrained for nearly 11 years of school. Oh, and serve breakfast before morning examinations and lunch before afternoon ones.

Construct as many learning tasks as you can that get them moving round the room. They have to get rid of that energy somehow.

A reprimand now and again does no harm whatsoever. They’re boys – as long as you’re fair, they’ll be fine.

Let them know you know what they think they know. And always be the adult.

Every time there’s a minor victory, celebrate! I have built my whole career around a line from Virgil, Success nourishes them: they can because they think they can, a better version of Henry Ford’s famous dictum. And keep things competitive; I’m not averse to awarding hard cash.

Doorknob! Apparently, if you’re an adolescent male and one of your mates farts, if you shout Doorknob before he shouts Safety you can hit him as hard as you like until he has touched the handle of a door, hence Doorknob! I told you I had insider info…

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A LIST OF POPULAR WEBSITES EVERY TEACHER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT. Check out the list below and let me know what you think.

1- Teachers Network

Teachers Network provides lesson plans, classroom specials, teacher designed activities for different subjects and many other resources.

2- Smithsonian Education

Smithsonian Education offers a wide variety of free resources for teachers, students and parents.

3- Education World

This is another great website for teachers. It provides teaching tips, lesson plans, activities, academic articles, web resources and many more.

4- Discovery Education

Discovery Education offers a broad range of free classroom resources that complement and extend learning beyond the bell 5- The Gateway

This is one of the oldest publically accessible U.S repositories of education resources on the web. It contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items.

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6- EdHelper

EdHelper provides teachers with free printables, graphic organizers, worksheets, lesson plans, games and many other activities.

7- Thinkfinity

Thinkfinity is a free online professional learning community that provides access to over 50.000 educators and experts in curriculum enhancement, along with thousands of award-winning digital resources for k-12

8- PBS Teachers

This is a great website that can help teachers grow professionally. It offers free teaching resources relevant to different grade category.

9- Teachers.net

Teachers.net is a platform where teachers can get to discover new teaching ideas and tips, lesson plans, classroom projects and many more 10- 42explore

42explore is a web project that provides resources and teaching materials on different subject areas and disciplines.

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11- A to Z Teacher Stuff

This is a teacher-created site designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily.

It provides lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials, printable worksheets and many more.

12- Teachers First

This is a rich collection of lessons, untis, and web resources designed to save teachers time by delivering just what they need in a practical, user-friendly, and ad-free format.

13- About Education

This is another great website for teachers. It includes free resources on different subject matters as well as articles and tips on teaching and learning.

14- Scholastic

Scholastic is a great website that provides a lot of different resources for teachers, parents, kids, administrators, and librarians.

15- Teach Hub

Teach Hub provides k-12 news, lessons and share resources created by teachers and shared with teachers.

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What OFSTED Say They Want October 13, 2012

A lot of teachers have been told that OFSTED will require them to stop teaching their classes and, instead, make children sit in groups knitting their own yoghurts, pausing only to be lectured on the minutiae of how to distinguish a level 5c from a level 4a. The best antidote to this is to hear what Michael Wilshaw, the head of OFSTED, actually said to the RSA when asked to describe a good teacher.

Here is a transcript of his comments: Perhaps I can start by mentioning two teachers to you that I remember from Mossbourne, my previous school. There are many good teachers there. I just want to mention two of them as a way of leading into this debate. One is an English teacher. She’s still teaching there. She’s in her late twenties. She’s an absolutely outstanding Advanced Skills Teacher and I remember observing lots of her lessons but I’ll mention just one of them. One of them was a lesson on the Merchant of Venice and she was teaching incredibly well. She had part of the class reciting Portia’s speech; you know, the quality of mercy. They were all doing that; this is a middle ability class. She had the Al Pacino film on the touchscreen behind her. She had a couple of youngsters dressed in Tudor garb and it was just one of those brilliant lessons that you see and it was full of energy; it was full of pace and she was moving around between the different groups doing different things.

That was one teacher; one lesson. The second lesson, or the second teacher I remember, was somebody in his late fifties. He was the head of maths. He was a very traditional teacher. He taught in a pretty didactic way, but the kids loved him across the ability range. He knew how to teach maths. You know what a great maths teacher does? Builds block by block to ensure that youngsters don’t move on until they understand the ground rules. He would spend many, many hours in the evening every night preparing powerpoints for himself and for the staff in his department and he would disseminate good practice, in terms of how to use powerpoints, to other people in his department and beyond his department to other schools in Hackney and beyond. And he produced absolutely fantastic results although some people would say he was a very didactic teacher. So these two people were very different teachers but incredibly successful and the reason why they were successful was because they developed a style of teaching with which they were comfortable, not complacent, but with which they were comfortable and which they knew worked. It worked because children enjoyed their lessons; were engaged; were focused; learnt a great deal and made real progress.

For me a good lesson is about what works. A good lesson is about what works. So this is a plea, this evening, for pragmatism not ideology in the way we judge the quality of teaching. I am reminded about Blair’s words in relation to that sterile debate on the academy programme and structural reform. He said: “what works is what’s good”. What works is what’s good and I have the same view in terms of teaching. We, and in that word “we” I include OFSTED, should be wary of trying to prescribe a particular style of teaching, whether it be a three part lesson; an insistence that there should be a balance between teacher led activities and independent learning, or that the lesson should start with aims and objectives with a plenary at the end and so on and so forth. We should be wary of too much prescription. In my experience a formulaic approach pushed out by a school or rigidly prescribed in an inspection evaluation schedule traps too many teachers into a stultifying and stifling mould which doesn’t demand that they use their imagination, initiative and common sense. Too much 10

direction is as bad as too little. Both teachers I’ve mentioned to you understood this but also understood that there were other things they had to do.

Firstly, planning was everything for them. They planned their lessons so that they knew what they were going to do; knew what resources they were going to deploy, and knew roughly how long each activity would take. But they also understood that planning shouldn’t be too detailed. It was a framework to give them the necessary flexibility to adapt to a different way of teaching at key moments in the lesson when the mood of the class, as it inevitably does, changes. They recognised that the worst lessons are those where the teacher ploughs through the lesson plan irrespective of how well or badly the lesson is going. OFSTED won’t necessarily require a lesson plan when inspectors observe, but they will want to see a planned lesson and there is a difference.

Secondly, these two people I’ve mentioned were incredibly reflective teachers who would adapt their lesson plan when things didn’t go well; so at the end of the lesson, or the end of the day, they’d go back to the lesson plan and change it. Because they were reflective people, they knew that they didn’t have the answers to everything and were prepared to learn from others although they were acknowledged by the school to be outstanding teachers. This meant that they talked a lot about their teaching to others, were happy to go into other teachers’ classrooms and were only too willing for other teachers to go into their classrooms. They acknowledged that, no matter how experienced they were, teaching was a learning experience.

Thirdly, they were very perceptive people who understood the dynamics of the classroom.

They quickly noticed when the pace of the lesson had dropped and when students had become disengaged and children’s attention has started to slacken. They were quick to notice when the classroom hubbub had reached an unacceptable level and Jack the lad was messing about at the back of the room. At the same time, they were quick to spot when a youngster found it difficult to understand the work and needed more help. In other words, they were highly interventionist teachers and knew how to dictate the pace of the lesson.

Fourthly, they understood the maxim that nothing is taught unless it’s learned. They measured their success, therefore, on whether children were learning and making progress and because they were hugely successful teachers this meant rapid progress. Whenever I observed them teach, they would stop the class at regular intervals and say “I just want to check that you’ve learnt this”. They were all great at picking out the inattentive child to ensure that he or she understood the importance of keeping up.

Finally, they were incredibly resilient people who withstood the slings and arrows and the occasional paper dart unflinchingly. They never let failure get the better of them; they learnt from it and came back stronger, tougher and better teachers. They were all in their different ways fierce characters; fierce, not in a repressive or bullying way, but tough on standards.

They weren’t authoritarians but they were authoritative. In other words they made sure youngsters knew who was in charge and who was setting the boundaries for acceptable behaviour. Both took a lead in professionally developing others and supported the school’s training programme. Both of them would have said that the leadership of teaching was the most important quality in headship and, of course, I endorse that view. Headship is about leading teaching first and foremost. A good head understands this and is, therefore, more outside his or her office than inside, patrolling the corridor, entering classrooms and engaging teachers and children throughout the school day. Good management is always secondary to good leadership of teaching. I knew both of these teachers well because I did that as a head.

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If you are going to be successful as a teacher, head of department or headteacher, you’ve got to be a high profile, highly visible person who has the physical and emotional energy to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Never believe that leadership of teaching can be done by remote control. OFSTED needs to endorse the school and the head who drives improvement in teaching. It is good that the new framework emphasises teaching more than anything else and that there is a clear correlation between the judgements on teaching and those on the overall effectiveness of the school. It is good that the inspectors will be asking questions about the robustness of performance management in relation to the quality of teaching and the salary levels of staff. It’s good that unannounced inspections will mean that inspectors see lessons as they normally are and – let me make this clear – if we see an extended piece of writing or reading, or the structured reinforcement of mathematical formula, where the children are engaged and learning then that’s fine. Let me also emphasise we do not want to see teaching simply designed to impress inspectors. We don’t want to see lessons which are more about classroom entertainment and promoting the personality of the teacher than embedding children’s learning in a meaningful way. So let that message be proclaimed from the rooftops. OFSTED will judge the quality of teaching in relation to the quality of learning and whether children and young people across the age and ability range are making the progress they should be from the starting points. There will be no OFSTED template which compels teachers to do things they wouldn’t normally do. We need to celebrate diversity, ingenuity and imagination in the way that we teach. Surely this is common sense. When every child is different; every class is different, and every year group is different. One size rarely fits all. Surely this adage must apply to teaching as it does to most things in life.

This article can be found on the web: http://teachingbattleground.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/what-ofsted-say-they-want/

How to move your lessons from good to outstanding!

A simple AfL questioning technique can revolutionise your teaching • Time to Pose, Pause, Bounce and Pounce!

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Can you muster a Tigger-like bounce in your classroom - and then go for the pounce?

Where would I be without Twitter? I have decided to elaborate on this AfL strategy, following this tweet from my @TeacherToolkit.

What is it?

It is a simple, yet sophisticated, AfL (Assessment for Learning) questioning technique to help teachers move from good-to-outstanding. It also helps address differentiation in the classroom and encourages teachers to take risks.

Why is it useful?

For many reasons. The reason I came across this technique was for us to develop our awareness of the new Ofsted criteria in 2009. This technique was a whole-school initiative deployed through our Teaching and Learning group with the wonderful Mr John Bayley.

The strategy encouraged teachers to take risks and tease out the "learning" in class. It also developed our school focus on differentiating objectives and learning experiences by varying our questioning techniques. NO more closed questions in our classrooms!

How does it work?

I have listed the four-part approach below with additional information that I hope explains the method.

1. POSE • Give the context of your approach to the class.

• Insist on hands down before the question is delivered.

• Provide a question or a series of questions, ensuring that you ask the students to remain reflective.

2. PAUSE...

This is the hard part.

• Ask the class to hold the thought; ... think; ... think again...

• If students are captivated and engaged, try holding the silence for a little while longer and...

• Push the boundaries. Keep the reflection for as long as possible.

3. BOUNCE(!)

• Insist the answer to the question comes from student A and possibly student B, directly and fast!

• Of course plan in your mind who you are going to ask, before speaking to the class.

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• Name student A to respond and don't move.

• Possibly don't speak and nip any comments, grunts or noises in the bud! Its magic when you can hear, see and feel a captivated learning audience. We've all seen it.

• Wait for an answer... pause... decipher the support needed if no response is evidently on its way. (Of course, at this stage, you can instigate various strategies for peers to support the questionable student A).

• If student A does manage to answer, the fun part starts here...

4. POUNCE! • Ask another student B (immediately) after the BOUNCE response, their opinion of student A's answer.

• This can be developed by asking student B and C their opinions to student A's response, irrespective if the answer is correct or not.

• An additional strategy is to bounce the question to a group A...and subsequently, a subgroup B if group A do not deliver a suitable way forward.

• This ensures the teacher is engaging a significant number of students with the question at hand, whilst using this strategy, it also ensures the entire class can be called upon at any given time by just returning to phase 1 or phase 3.

Many, many teachers are very reluctant to hold onto a question or a stumbling block in class.

I know because I have done it; but my greatest lessons are often the ones that involve the ethos being established from the outset and (me) not being afraid to tease out "why?" student A or B thinks the way they do...

Ensure that all your students understand a concept. Test it before moving on. Try it tomorrow. Don't accept student E or student K shouting out the answer to maintain pace or behaviour. Don't allow student T to answer the question because (you know they won't let you down and) they will help you move on during an observation lesson!

Explore! Tease the topic in hand.

Teasing out their thinking skills and understanding it is far more important than moving onto the next page in the lesson. That's what learning (education) is all about, right (Mr Gove)?

• Written by Ross Morrison McGill. He can be found on Twitter @TeacherToolkit. He is an Assistant Headteacher and award-winning teacher (Guardian Award for Teacher of the Year in a Secondary School in London - 2004) and is a former SSAT Design Technology Lead Practitioner 2009/10. He is also an ASCL UK Council representative for London, an adviser for ONSchool Free School and a member of the Guardian Teacher Network adviser panel.

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Interesting article from ‘The Daily Mail’.

Children learn twice as fast if they're banned from raising hands in class

By David Derbyshire UPDATED: 11:59, 6 September 2010 Hands down: The Classroom Experiment found pupils achieved better results when they kept their hands down.

Banning children from raising their hands in class improves their academic performance, research suggests.

In a remarkable experiment, a class of 13-year-olds learned twice as quickly when they were not allowed to put their hands up in response to a teacher’s question.

Instead, the entire class was forced to write answers on small whiteboards and raise their answers in the air together.

The technique, which was tested for a two-part BBC2 documentary, did not just help the shy and less able children, the programme makers say. It also boosted the results of confident pupils.

The Classroom Experiment – which will be broadcast later this month – also found that making pupils exercise at the start of each day helped academic performance.

Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the London University Institute for Education, who led the project, said: ‘The kids and teachers hated it at the beginning.

‘The kids who were used to having a quiet time were rattled at having to do something; the ones who were used to showing off to the teacher were upset.’

The methods were tested on 25 pupils at Hertswood school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, for a term.

Professor Wiliam said he wanted to stop the minority of bright pupils dominating the class and to encourage the whole class to take responsibility for their behaviour.

As well as banning hand raising, work was only graded when pupils had finished an entire project to encourage them to take account of the teacher’s feedback, not just their mark out of ten.

Top of the class: Professor Dylan William wanted to stop the minority of bright pupils dominating the class, and to encourage the whole class to take responsibility for their behaviour. (Picture posed by models)

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The teacher also monitored a single pupil’s behaviour each day – without telling the class which student was being placed under scrutiny – and then offered a reward of a day at Alton Towers if the student behaved.

The move was intended to encourage the whole group to take responsibility for earning the reward.

Professor Wiliam also made children do PE at the start of every day ‘The changes we made gave the quieter children confidence, made all pupils know they are expected to participate and created a more supportive atmosphere – nobody laughs any more if someone gets something wrong,’ he said.

‘I hope this programme shows how difficult high-quality teaching is.’

After one term, pupils learned at twice the speed of peers not taking part and the school was so impressed by the experiment it is continuing with the techniques.

Hertswood head Jan Palmer Sayer said: ‘The difference was tangible – both in achievements and the dynamics of the class.

‘Teachers were given clear strategies for improvements which didn’t involve spending lots of money on new technology.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1309268/Banning-children-putting-handsclass-makes-children-learn-twice-fast.html#ixzz29MOLXZvJ

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The ‘Washing Hands’ of Learning: Think Pair Share Posted by headguruteacher ⋅ July 17, 2012 ⋅ 4 Comments

A blog about something really obvious but worth spelling out.

After 25 years of teaching, I’ve been through a fair amount of dodgy INSET/CPD. As a result I am something of a ‘visiting speaker’ sceptic. However, it hasn’t all been bad; far from it.

Some ideas have been very influential such as the ideas behind CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) developed at Kings in the 1990s; also the principles of formative assessment that have trickled into our collective consciousness as teachers since ‘Inside the Black Box’. Whilst some ideas have helped me to frame an overarching philosophy for teaching or have augmented my armoury of teaching tools, there is one simple strategy that has transformed the way I teach every lesson, every day: Think, Pair, Share.

I used to be a ‘hands up’ merchant just like a lot of people. Then, at an INSET session about 10 years ago, delivered by a superb trainer from Haringey LA (employed through National Strategies – imagine!) the seed was sown that ‘hands up’ might not be such a great idea. It is so obvious when you think about it. In fact it is rather alarming that such a poor and even harmful strategy is still so deeply ingrained in pedagogical practice. For years I’d fought my way through the forest of hands- “Oo, oo, oo, me, me, me!!!” OR faced the tumbleweed of deathly silence; those ‘blood out of stone’ moments when you scan the room desperately looking for someone willing to give you an answer and everyone is staring at the floor. And of course there would often have been kids at the back wishing ‘please, please, don’t ask me, I haven’t got a clue.’

But the solution came: Every time you ask a question, get the students to think first, then discuss it in pairs before they answer. Lightening bolt. This simple strategy has transformed how I teach – and helped develop an entirely new way of thinking about teaching. I’ve since often referred to this as the ‘washing hands’ of teaching. This is the hospital analogy where the single simplest act with the greatest impact is to ensure every hospital worker washes their hands after each patient contact; i.e. changing something that you do all the time every day has an enormous impact.

I think it is worth revisiting just why ‘hands up’ is such a poor strategy:        

Only one person gets to answer at a time so you have no idea what most people are thinking.

The answer can be offered before others have had a chance to work it out for themselves.

Students can opt out of answering or thinking altogether if they choose to. They can hide.

It is difficult to express confusion or simply to say that you don’t know the answer.

In the ‘forest of hands’ scenario, the competitiveness inhibits less confident students (and there are gender-specific behaviours here that can’t be ignored).

In the ‘blood out of a stone’ scenario, you can’t tell if students are really stuck or just too unsure of themselves to offer a public answer.

Very often ‘Hands up’ goes together with closed questions with very short ‘think time. We are not comfortable with silence –and expect responses within seconds of asking a question.

Ingrained patterns of behaviour develop; students who always put a hand up and students who never do.

So, what changes when you ask routinely, ‘in your pairs, discuss…..’: 17

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Crucially, in doing this you are creating a small bubble of security around each pair; a safe space where they can think for a while and say whatever they like. ‘I think X’, ‘No, I think Y’…’I haven’t got a clue’, ‘I wasn’t really listening’ ‘It is more complicated than that… maybe it is X except when it is Y?’ In this bubble it is safe to admit you don’t understand and the pair can pluck up the courage together to report this back. Easier to say ‘we don’t get it’ rather than ‘I don’t get it’.

Every single student can engage in answering the question; they are all generating answers simultaneously – and there is less chance of hiding. Shy students will speak to their partner; the blood comes out of the stone! It has an immediate effect.

Two heads are better than one. If the question is a good one, pairs can debate their answer. They can then rehearse it and feedback to each other..’yes, that sounds good but maybe also say this….’

When the teacher brings the class together to hear answers, the students are repeating something they have rehearsed. It is easy to report back ‘we thought that maybe it is XYZ’ when you have already thought this through… compared to being put on the spot with a cold question. It is crucial in the report-back phase to ask selected pairs directly to share their discussion; it means everyone needs to be prepared to report back in case they are asked. Using a building process is also key here – anything to add, to challenge, any better or different answers? And so on. (It is not always time-efficient to get each pair to share their answer.)

I could go on…. it is just such a powerful change. Still now, it is by far the most common piece of feedback I give after lesson observations: ‘If you had asked them to discuss in pairs, the learning would have been better’. The question is, why do teachers still ask for hands up or accept it when students take them down the ‘hands up’ cul-de-sac? What are the barriers to adopting ‘in your pairs’ as the default mode of questioning? 

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For some it is about behaviour management. To repeatedly stop and start a class –full of kids talking is more difficult than keeping a lid on them and taking one answer at a time.

Good stop-start strategies need to be developed and rehearsed.

It can be overwhelming dealing with all the answers that are generated. After 15 paired discussions – what do you do then? The key is to encourage active listening and the process of building on previous answers as you sample the responses. Sampling is valid – and much much better than only taking a couple of cold hands-up responses.

Students default to hands-up themselves and have to be trained out of it – which can be a drag. Yes, it can, but it soon works if you ignore students with hands up and get the pair discussion going. If you reward ‘hands up’, that is what you’ll get.

It can feel like a sledgehammer to crack a nut if you only want to know ‘what is the capital of Spain ‘or ‘what is 3 x 4’. Well it is. But is that a good question in the first place?

This is the crux; think-pair-share forces us to ask better questions. There is room for a few sharp closed questions in a lesson but if we are looking for higher order thinking, answers that model literacy skills as well as content and, generally, are probing to a deeper level of understanding, then ‘hands up’ with closed questioning, is never going to be enough.

Once you are into the groove of routine ‘in your pairs’ questioning, you find yourself asking better questions –it all flows.

So, thank you to Alison from Haringey for showing me the light! I’ve never looked back….

My hands are clean – are yours!!??

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Follow David on Twitter - @_DavidDrake @TeachingBites and @AbbGeography Email - djd@abbeyfield.wilts.sch.uk David Drake - Advanced Skills Teacher.

Abbeyfield School. Chippenham SUNDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2012 OfSted arrive!

On the 27th and 28th of September 2012, we were ‘done’! The views, observations and opinions below are my thoughts following the OfSted inspection. They are my reflections and mine alone – and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer.

So the email circulated at lunchtime on Wednesday: ‘Urgent meeting in the staff room at 3.15pm’. For someone who has been through four Ofsted inspections, it could only mean one thing!

So the frantic preparations began for the arrival of the inspection team the next morning. My first thoughts went back to our last inspection in 2009, where we were graded as ‘satisfactory’ and the comments made then, that too much teaching was safe. On those two days, many went into their comfort zone and relied on lessons delivered from the front with power point led lessons, trying to cover all bases with pages of objectives, NC level aims etc etc. As a result the quality of teaching was graded as ‘satisfactory’.

We were ‘done’ last time at the start of the new framework in 2009 and as a result, felt aggrieved that we had been dealt with harshly. Since then, the framework has changed twice and each time we had been told that the threshold in each category had been raised…. Gulp!

As a school we have been through quite traumatic events over the last few years, but throughout, the staff and students have worked very hard to ensure that for the last five years, our results have improved year-on-year. As a result, I was convinced that we deserved better.

So, I sat down to re-plan my lessons for the next two days – as you do. I had already planned some lessons, lots of group work, laptops, movement etc, so was thinking of how I could change them to make sure that I was fully in control and that I could ensure that behaviour was not an issue. Ten minutes later, I thought…. Actually I am not going to change anything. There was plenty in these lessons that could go wrong (and did by the way) but, this is how it is. All my previous in-school, county and OfSted observations had been positive, so why change it. I did my lesson plans – very brief and hand written on our department template and photocopied another set of seating plans from my folder.

Day one, full teaching day…. Nothing. The door was open all day, but nobody arrived. Day two, Period 1, Year 9 arrived. In they came, register done and lesson introduced based on the storms and floods across the UK that week as part of the ‘Deadly Geography’ unit. Many of the resources they needed I had collected earlier that week and posted: http://abbeyfieldhumanities.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/stormy19

weather-expected-this-week.html These were to be accessed via the laptops I had booked. So the trolley was sat at the front of the room humming away - enough for one between two. Working in groups, they had to investigate the causes, effects and possible future management strategies that could be employed in the event of a similar flood event. In addition, the groups had a blank UK map, atlases, sugar paper and three newspaper articles from papers I had bought on the frantic drive to school that morning.

Quick 5 minute intro from me – two simple slides on the whiteboard. Slide one – A single lesson objective. Slide Two – What the presentation had to include for each NC level to be achieved…..and then they were off. The room was swarming with bodies moving all over the place, collecting laptops, loading laptops, bits of paper everywhere, students wandering around collecting resources etc. I just stood and watched…

What have I done? They could have all been sat in silence, writing in their books and I would be nice and calm, checking progress, giving the SEN children scaffolding worksheets, asking difficult questions of the AG&T students and providing writing frames to stretch them etc. Instead, it looked like chaos (to me).

Two minutes later, all the laptops crashed! Sir… Sir….Sir…Sir…. aarrgghh! I turn around just in time to see the inspector arrive, followed by the inspector inspecting the inspector! My career was flashing before my eyes. Is this what it feels like just before a heart attack?! I thought.

I took a moment…… this stuff happens all the time, things go wrong in my lessons and you adapt and get on with it. So all the laptops were shutdown and returned to the trolley (which at that moment was going to have a meeting with a large sledgehammer at some point.) and we carried on. The kids were not fazed, it was not unusual for technology to fail in the lesson (DVD, projector, laptops etc), so they just carried on, using the newspaper articles instead. I appeared to be the only one who was remotely bothered!

The kids were great, working in their table groups – totally absorbed. For the next 40 minutes the two inspectors wandered around, talking to the kids, asking questions and making copious notes. I was virtually redundant! I didn’t stop the class once. I did no teaching from the front, just circulated checking they knew what they were doing and giving suggestions and instructions to the student who had been put in charge of each table.

Five minutes before the end, we wrapped up, did a quick plenary and off the kids went. The inspectors and I were left alone in the room……. Deep breath….. ‘Any chance of some quick feedback?’ I ask. ‘Amazing… Outstanding’ came the response. The relief was overwhelming.

To summarise, she said that by talking to the kids, it was clear to her that this was not a one-off Ofsted lesson and I was just doing what I normally do and not playing it safe – relying on teaching from the front to have constant control of the lesson.

Things go wrong, but so what? she said. They were all engaged, they and we were clear about what they were meant to be doing and were doing it….. Maybe the laptops can live for another day then!

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I can’t say yet what we were graded as a school until the report is officially released.

All I can say is that we are very happy. I guess the feedback from the inspector following my lesson sums it up. We didn’t all play it safe. We just did what we normally do. As teachers we regularly plan interesting, challenging, risky, thoughtprovoking, topical lessons. Colleagues at my own school do and I know from the tweets I read from the geography teachers I follow on Twitter via @_DavidDrake, many, many others do too on a daily basis. Things often go wrong, and normally we just chalk it up to experience and learn from it for next time, but when we get ‘the call’ or get observed for Performance Management we can sometimes seize up and teach like we are back in the 1950s. I know I have sometimes.

When you get ‘the call’, and the people with clipboards arrive at your door… just do what you do. Staying up until 2 am producing copious pages of power point slides with 15 differentiated objectives, mini-plenaries every 10 minutes, 6 page lesson plans, 20 different worksheets for every conceivable type of student will just make you look like death warmed up…. Forget it.

In my humble opinion Mr Gove, there is a reason that GCSE and A-Level results keep going up and it is not that the exams are getting easier. It is that the quality of teaching in this country is the best it has ever been. The vast majority of teachers work ridiculous hours and invest a massive amount of time, care and energy into the schools they work in and the students they teach. The idea that we stop work at 3pm and need to work harder is frankly ignorant to say the least. As someone who has worked with teachers in 12 different secondary schools in Wiltshire whilst a countyAST I feel that I have a reasonable amount of evidence to back up this view.

So, fellow Super-heroes - don’t play it safe when they arrive… Take the risks you normally would. That’s what we keep telling our students isn’t it?

Take a backseat and let the students carry on. Then when it’s all done and dusted, have a big Full English Breakfast!

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THE Number 1 Bit of Classroom Kit: Mini-whiteboards Posted by headguruteacher ⋅ August 28, 2012 ⋅ 2 Comments

At KEGS we have made it possible for every teacher to have a set of mini-whiteboards or ‘show-me boards’ in every classroom, as featured in a recent newsletter. A full set with pens and wipers costs £60 – a bargain. We are now trying to introduce dry-wipe pens as compulsory school equipment.

So, why are they so great? I usually introduce this at CPD events by giving all the participants a pen and board and asking them questions of various kinds. To begin with, a tricky 11+ question:

I ask people to work out what the questions should be. They should show me their answers or write a big question mark, unhappy face or something that indicates that they’re not sure.

Then, on a countdown, all at once, I ask them to show me their boards. Across the room there is always a range of responses; some correct answers, some wild guesses and quite a few ‘don’t know’s’. Straight away it is clear to everyone: without the boards, how else would I know every student’s response at once? There is no more efficient way to know a) who knows and b) who doesn’t have a clue.

However, the crux of this is that I can give immediate feedback – and ask follow-up questions. To those who got it right, the least important thing to know is the right answer; the question is ‘how did you work it out?’ Then to those who were slightly wrong – ‘what made you think of that’? And so on….. It is such a rich source of two-way feedback.

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Immediately compelling – and the reason so many teachers use them a lot.

The next set of demo questions, highlight other uses: 1) Why do you breathe faster after exercise? (four marks). Work in pairs and then use the whiteboards to jot down your four key points. This generates enormous discussion. Throw in a bonus point for using the word ‘respiration’ – that gets people talking some more. Then, all once ‘ show me’! A sea of whiteboards.. At a quick glance you can see a range of responses; it is possible to draw out common answers, off-piste but not entirely wrong answers and so on…. before perhaps agreeing on the best ones.

2) Write a sentence in French (or any language) saying what you will do tomorrow – and then show me.

3) Write a Haiku about Usain Bolt…. and 1,2,3, Show me….

4) Draw a diagram to show.. (model of convection, water cycle, graph of y= 3x- 4 and so on) In each case, there is the same sequence of events: Every student is attempting to answer every question. This can be solo, or can be used to generate pair/group discussion. The teacher is able to see every single response which almost always yields the following:    

correct answers – including the variety within that idea of ‘correctness’ leading to the ‘how did you work it out/ what was your thought process?’ question common errors or misconceptions that can be challenged or corrected unexpected answers or approaches that add depth/interest/flavour to the proceedings. students admitting that they are unsure or don’t know (and how else would you know?)

The pitfalls with whiteboards are the following: a) Making them too difficult to get out; it is a disaster if you have to book them; they should be accessible spontaneously. Best of all, get them out all the time. (I’m not a fan of ‘back of planner’ whiteboard inserts because they are too small and teachers tend not to use them.) b) Failing to take account of all the responses in shaping a lesson. I have seen teachers ask for responses on whiteboards, only to say ‘ how interesting’ and move on regardless. The point is to use the students’ responses to inform what happens next. c) Using them too little (leading to tedious novelty item behaviours) or too often ( the students become jaded and the impact wears off.) They are great for new ideas and for revision/consolidation.

Whiteboards are extremely popular at KEGS across a range of subjects. They are a big hit in Maths – to see all the different solutions to problems – and in MFL where the ephemeral nature of any whiteboard writing liberates students; they are so much less inhibited in trying out new grammar and vocab when they know they can wipe the board clean any time.

If you don’t have your own set, get one! You’ll wonder how you managed without them.

PS Answer to the 11+ question: Left: R or T; must be T black object behind. ; Right S or F; must be S as S is square not circle So the answer is T, S 23

The Telegraph Computer games can dramatically boost children’s exam results Playing computer games can dramatically boost children’s exam results in basic subjects, it is claimed.

The University of Rochester researchers found that children who played video games were quick thinkers and had good hand-eye co-ordination. By Graeme Paton.

Pupils with regular access to games based on traditional favourites such as space invaders and football penalty shoot-outs significantly improved their scores in GCSE English, maths and science, it was revealed.

Teachers said the use of the system – employed by some 900 primary and secondary schools – promoted “stealth learning”, with children unwittingly picking up key skills while being engrossed in computer games.

It was also claimed that they created healthy competition between pupils who sought to achieve higher scores and climb school leader boards.

The disclosure comes despite previous fears from experts that too much access to screenbased entertainment damages children’s attention span and forces them to lose concentration.

Research by Yardleys School, a top state secondary in Birmingham, compared results among children who accessed games produced by the Doncaster education company i-education.

It emerged that 70 per cent of regular users exceeded pre-set GCSE targets in maths compared with just 40 per cent of other pupils.

In English, 70 per cent of gamers did well in exams compared with 50 per cent of other pupils, while in science half of pupils inflated their scores against 30 per cent of their classmates.

David Pohl, the school’s deputy head, said: “It’s clear that in core subjects those who use it the most stand a significantly increased chance of meeting their GCSE target grades.

“It’s giving students the opportunity to continue their learning outside of lessons. Students are still playing football and having fun but they are also heavily engaged in continuing their learning outside of school.”

Pupils across Britain are currently able to play the games – mostly outside school time – in which they answer a series of on-screen questions before accessing puzzles.

In one penalty shoot-out game, students answer questions before being allowed to use their computer mouse to score goals. Wrong answers make it harder to beat the keeper.

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Correct answers in another game – based on space invaders – give pupils more time to fire at aliens.

Pupils with the most correct answers are then featured on school-wide leader boards, giving them the chance to compete against friends.

Making feedback stick There’s really no argument about the fact that feedback is pretty important. It sits right at the top of the list of strategies which make the biggest impact on students’ progress. If we’re not giving students feedback on their learning then, frankly, what in God’s good name are we doing? There is nothing else which should have a higher priority in your teaching.

OK, with that off my chest, it’s important to acknowledge that there a couple of problems to be aware of. All, sadly, is not rosy in the feedback garden.

Firstly, most of the feedback students get comes from their peers and, sadly, most of that is wrong. It would seem that nature abhors a lack of feedback almost as much as it does a vacuum: any lack of meaningful feedback on the part of teachers is an opportunity for misinformation to breed. The second problem is that approximately 70% of the feedback given by teachers to students is not received’. That is to say, the students either don’t read it, don’t understand it, or don’t act on it.

Some other problems associated with feedback are:     

Feedback is most often accepted when it confirms existing beliefs; where beliefs are challenged, feedback is often rejected If you give feedback to the whole class students think it must be directed at someone else and no one ‘receives’ it.

Students often find teachers feedback to be “confusing, non-reasoned and not understandable” Even when they do understand, they’re not sure how to apply it to their learning Most feedback is related to tasks rather than processes

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And once you’ve digested all that, there’s also the thorny dilemmas of giving grades and mixing feedback with praise.

So what to do? Prof Hattie suggests that feedback needs to be: ‘just in time’, ‘just for me’, ‘just where I am in my learning process’, and ‘just what I need to help me make progress’.

Regrettably, it often isn’t.

Armed as we are with all this knowledge, it’s time to examine some strategies for making feedback stick. At my new school we use a system for recording written feedback called Triple Impact Marking.

TIM stickers The idea is as follows: 1. Students reflects on what went well (www) and what might have made their work even better (ebi) 2. The teacher asks questions about the students’ work: How could you…? What might…? Do you think…?

3. Students answers the question and explains how they will improve next time.

The hard bit is forcing yourself not to correct students’ work but instead to get down and dirty with a spot of dialogic questioning. I found this a real mental gear shift and at first struggled to find the best sorts of questions to prompt meaningful reflection at stage 2. My experience is that it’s best to ask something concrete like “How many adjectives have you used?” rather than something abstract like “Is your writing descriptive enough?” This will get the student to read their work back but also gets them thinking about whether using only 2 adjectives was really enough to qualify their writing as descriptive.

I have urge for neatness and the tendency to rush. In an attempt to bring balance to my warring nature I’ve designed a sticker on which feedback will be recorded. This also has the added advantages of being hard to miss in students’ books and will focus both teachers and students on fitting otherwise rambling comments into the space provided.

Of course, for all this to have any impact at all, the next time must be as soon as possible.

Asking students to hold feedback in their heads indefinitely doesn’t work: there must be given an opportunity to act on it next lesson.

For me the most crucial aspect is that feedback should not come at the end of something. If it’s to be meaningful it has to happen during the process in which students are engaged.

Now as this isn’t always possible during a lesson we need to plan for opportunities to act on feedback.

We’re often in a rush to cover the next bit of the curriculum but this is yet another reminder that sticking rigidly to schemes of work and ploughing on with the next part of the course is a sure-fire, guaranteed way of preventing students making progress. And who wants that?

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