Tanglin Edu Vol. 1

VOL. 1 | FEBRUARY 2020

TANGLIN EDU Sharing the best practice and research from around the world

RESOURCES Book Suggestion This is a great book that shares lots of educational research with practical applications to use in the classroom.

Welcome to Tanglin Trust School's Teaching and Learning Newsletter The purpose of the newsletter is to collate and share best practice in education and share current research around teaching and learning. In every edition there will be a range of resources, apps, ideas and suggestions to enhance your CPD.

Research Reading Articles: Cognitive Load and Memory Research-based principles for Designing Multimedia Instruction by E. Mayer

10Â Benefits of Testing and Their Applications to Educational Practice

by Roediger, Putnam, Smith

Pass The Pod In this podcast, Phil Naylor interviews teachers, leaders and experts to muse over the latest thinking on teaching and learning, leadership and CPD. Website Suggestion This website is packed full of ideas and resources that you can download for free.

TRYTHISTEACHING.COM

App Suggestion An App to create and share quizzes that will aid retrieval practice.

Evidence Based Practice As teachers, we are faced with making hundreds of decisions a day. To do this well, our best hope is that our decisions are wellinformed by knowledge - gained over years of experience, our engagement with learning theories and the general principles of good teaching practice. Here are some examples across Tanglin where teachers are engaging with research to inform their practice and trial new and exciting changes to positively impact student outcomes.

Increasing Activity Levels in Class Teacher PE

By Joe Moriarty, Head of Infant PE

What I’m working on Whilst on a learning walk earlier this year, I had a chance to watch a class teacher PE lesson developing fundamental movement skills (FMS).

The class teacher was doing a great job, carefully following the plan that had been provided and the children were performing a variety of skills and movements that are beneficial when building the foundations of athletic ability. The issue was that in the time they had, the children were spending a large proportion of it waiting for their turn. Therefore, the challenge was to see what changes could be made to increase the amount of time the children spent active during the lesson. I sat down with Darren Welldon to redesign the lessons ensuring key FMS remained whilst also improving overall time spent being active.

ProQuest

The picture below shows the old and new plans side by side. The old plan on the left was highly structured with children waiting to have their turn on the traffic light spots. Only the catching activity at the bottom, had all children participating at the same time. At best, 15 children would be moving at the same time with 9 sitting waiting. The plan on the right allows for 12 children to be constantly moving around the outside of the space completing movement challenges. The space left in the middle is for the other half of the class to work on hand/foot eye coordination challenges. Therefore all 24 children can be active at any one time.

What the research says It’s no secret that generally activity levels are on the decline. WHO statistics suggest over 80% of adolescents and young people are insufficiently active. With limited space and high rise living here in Singapore, the environment we live in is not as conducive for children to be physically active in their free time.

It is imperative that we make the most of the time we have here in school.

Impact on learning To support this redesign, I sat in on two classes and recorded the time spent active and inactive in both lessons by monitoring 1 child from each class. The figure below shows the results.

The sample size is obviously very small; however, it’s clear to see the changes had a big impact on the amount of activity taking place.

Incredibly, with the old style of lesson plan, the children were almost inactive for half of the lesson. This dropped to just less than a quarter thanks to the changes in design.

What I’ve noticed Just through observations, the differences were clear. The children were out of breath, sweating and completing far more repetitions of the hand/foot eye coordination challenges. As an added bonus, because there was less waiting around, they were also more engaged and focused during the lesson. We have now adapted all the previous plans to maximise activity levels during the class teacher PE FMS lessons and it’s great to see how a small change in design can have a big impact on the amount of physical activity the children get to complete.

Using Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom

By Olly Griffin, Year 6 Class Teacher Artificial Intelligence in education is more than science fiction. There are several powerful tools within this emerging area of technology that are having an impact in schools and changing the future of what education might look like. Although experts believe that the critical presence of a teacher is irreplaceable, A.I. has the potential to significantly reduce teacher workload and enhance personalised learning pathways for children.

What I’m working on In my maths lessons, I am currently trialing an edtech platform that uses diagnostic testing to identify what a student's knowledge is and then develops personalised content based on the students specific needs. The software is called Atom Learning and is simple to use in lessons, with resources and tests created in just a few clicks.

Starter questions, video explanations and fluency questions that aid retrieval practice are readily made available for the children and when tasks are

completed, instant feedback is provided. If mistakes were made, misconceptions can be identified. There is also an explanation available to guide the child’s learning. The best feature is that it offers a personalised learning journey. The software logs results and using a sophisticated algorithm which provides questions that are accessible, but a little out the students’ comfort zone. Live scores are available for the teacher so that learning can be tracked over time.

What the research says Adjusting learning based on an individual student’s particular needs has been a priority for educators for years, but A.I. will allow a level of differentiation that’s impossible for teachers who have to manage a large group of students. Feedback is key to keeping our learning environments personalised. Immediate feedback and the possibility to correct it quickly after the moment it is made promotes autonomy and self-learning. This makes the pace of learning more adaptable to each individual and can be a powerful motivator. Atom Learning and software like it could facilitate this becoming a regular routine in our classrooms .

Impact on learning Not only will this aid retrieval practice, which will allow children to transfer knowledge to their long term

How The Tanglin Library Can Support Your CPD Use this QR Code to access TTS Senior Library resources to support your CPD. Use OpenAthens if you wish to access them from home.

There is a wealth of articles, databases and e-books that you have access to from the following sources

ProQuest

JSTOR Digital Library

EBSCO Research Platform

The library has a co-operative arrangement with other libraries in Singapore, including The National Library Board.

If you are looking for materials for your reference and research purposes that are not available in the library please email the Senior Library team or stop by the library to request an inter-library loan.

memory, it ensures that every child is receiving quality feedback on their maths learning. Students can access extensions that are specifically suited to them. This level of challenge can lead to a significant increased level of engagement.

What I’ve noticed I have noticed children love independence. I have also noticed that although verbal and written feedback from parents and teachers is important, occasional feedback from software feels more internal. It comes from each individual according to their perception of their results, without being evaluated by anyone else. External feedback, on the other hand, comes from other people such as teachers or parents, therefore it could become a useful aid to support meta-cognition strategies.

Seeing it in action

It is a tool that would only be used in planning two or three times per week when carrying out the fluency part of a maths lesson. I would be more than happy for anyone to arrange a time to see how it works.

There are a few other teachers in Year 6 and Year 5 also trialling it which will show you different ways it is being implemented.

Twitter is an incredible resource for inspiration and discussion for educators around the world. It allows you to engage with experts and professionals and keep up to date with the current thinking and research in education. For handy guide on how to set up a Twitter account then read this extract from Love to Teach by Kate Jones

Harnessing Long Term Memory

By Luke Hensman, Head of Year 12 Senior Humanities How often do we hear students bemoan the hours of cramming they see before them, when preparing for an impending assessment?

As teachers, we know that such a scenario is not inevitable. We also know that cramming will prove inadequate beyond the immediate time scale.

So how do we help students to swap this perennial last resort for a strategy that fosters both wellbeing and academic success? How can we ensure that we structure learning to encourage consistency, rather than intensity, of student application?

What I’m working on

we can only keep in mind at one time as few as three, and no more than seven, new pieces of information, it is very difficult to apply information to a task if we do not have a deep store of information to draw upon. It is appealing to think that the internet has saved us from ever having to commit information to memory.

However, there is a high degree of consensus in cognitive psychology that knowledge begets knowledge; the more we have the easier it is to integrate and apply new information.

Decades of research also show that the act of retrieving information from memory is one of the most effective ways of developing storage strength, the ability to retain information over the long term. Research also shows that spacing study, rather than cramming it, is crucial if we want information to move from our shortterm to our long-term memories. Three separate sessions of 20 minutes over the space of a week, for example, is likely to be more effective than one hour of massed practice.

Over the last couple of years, I have Impact on learning been experimenting with strategies As students build their storage drawn from cognitive science, to help strength, they are better able to handle my A level Politics students embed complex tasks, as well as to apply information into their long-term knowledge to novel contexts. memories. At the start of every lesson Greater storage strength has the students recall from memory anything potential to build students’ confidence they can from a segment of a topic in lessons, as well as reducing acute anxiety in the lead up to assessments. previously studied. Initially, this Whilst it will not, of course, eliminate occurs a few days after first stress or study in the days immediately encountering the information, then a prior to an assessment, it can allow second recall after a few weeks, then a students to prioritise certain couple of months, on and on, with the information, whilst feeling reassured gap growing larger every time. For that they have already built a solid bank homework, students review their of knowledge over the preceding weeks retrieval practices, identify gaps in and months. their knowledge and then apply techniques, such as mnemonics and What I’ve noticed dual coding, to make the information I would love to say that students stick in their memories. In this way, clamour to do their retrieval practice at students have multiple opportunities the commencement of every lesson, but throughout a course to embed what alas that is not the reality. Trying to ProQuest JSTOR Digital Library they learn. remember is difficult, but that is

when a student can remember something that they previously could not. To allay fears of “I can’t remember anything”, retrieval practice can be differentiated, with prompts or scaffolds provided. That which is recalled could be a story, or an image or a process, not only a list of facts. So, how it looks will differ from subject to subject, year group to year group, even student to student.

Seeing it in action I am delighted that nearly 20 teachers in the Senior School have volunteered to trial retrieval practices over the course of Terms 2 and 3. We are in the process of developing the measurement tools to gauge impact, which can be used to influence further use of the strategies. I would be delighted to meet with anyone who would like to know more.

Retrieval Reading and Resources The Power of Retrieval Rosenshine's Principles in Action

by Tom Sherrington

How The Tanglin Library Can Support Your CPD

What the research says The stark limitations of our working memory make the utilisation of longterm memory absolutely paramount. If

part of why it is effective. As teachers, we should be providing desirable difficulties for students; tasks that are not too easy and not too hard.

Furthermore, student buy-in emerges

Daily Recap Ideas Teach Like Nobody's Watching

by Mark Enser

Retrieval Challenge Grid Templates From ICT Evangelist Resources