Working with trainees: Format Matters and the importance of BY…

One of my favourite lines in TLaC is when Doug Lemov states: “The complete sentence is the battering ram that knocks down the door to college.” Insisting pupils answer questions or contribute to class discussions in full sentences will support them to write in full, well-articulated sentences. Put simply: if they can say it, they can write it.

I sometimes roll my eyes when I hear appeals to developing pupils’ ‘oracy’, as it can be one of those generic, positive-sounding catch-alls that sounds great and would be hard to argue against, but can also mean whatever the person saying it and the person hearing it want it to mean, which can be something great, or nothing much at all. But, of course, the genius of TLaC is its focus on the specific and the concrete, and Format Matters is a brilliantly simple, implementable way to develop ‘oracy’ in the service of making pupils cleverer.

However, this is not easy to embed in classrooms, as reflected in this honest and insightful blog by Yousuf Hamid (@yousufhamid), an economics teacher in London: https://mydiminishingreturns.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-benefits-of-making-pupils-respond.html. Yousuf identifies several familiar barriers to doing this effectively, from explaining to pupils why it is important, through simply remembering to insist upon it and overcoming the sense that it is somewhat ‘cringey’ to do so, to persisting when pupils find it hard.

I have been drawing on the recent excellent ‘The Power of By…’ blog by Adam Boxer (@adamboxer1) to be more precise in the action steps I set for my trainees by (see what I’m doing here…) using the ‘Achieve X by…’ formulation: https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2021/04/27/the-power-of-by/.

I recently had cause to give feedback on this very aspect of classroom practice and so I thought it would be useful to outline how I did so, using Adam’s ‘Power of By…’ to hopefully overcome some of the barriers identified by Yousuf.

Here is my feedback, with actions steps phrased using the ‘Power of By…’:

Breaking them down to explain one by one:

• Communicating to them that they should answer verbally in full sentences before they begin a discussion task and/or before you pose questions;

Including the expectation in your communication of the Means of Participation is crucial. Firstly, it is an opportunity to reinforce the expectation. Secondly, it gives pupils the chance to rehearse their answers in the format you require during the discussion task, which makes it more likely they will be able to produce a full sentence response out loud to the class.

• Using the writing frames/sentence starters you plan for their writing as ‘speaking frames’, by directing pupils to these to structure their answers.

Especially when you first introduce this expectation, pupils will find it hard both to remember and to do. We are used to using sentence starters and writing frames to support writing, so using the very same structures a ‘speaking frames’ will support pupils when the expectation is new to them.

Alternatively, a prompt such as ‘use the wording of the question and turn it into the start of your answer’ can help, eg:

Question: “In which year was the Battle of Hastings fought?”

Answer: The Battle of Hastings was fought in…”

Again, direct pupils to these before their discussion/before you pose the question, so that they can rehearse.

Now we get into what to do when pupils don’t answer in a full sentence. There are probably three reasons for this: they forgot to, they don’t want to, or they can’t. I think we should respond by tackling the reasons in that order, in a kind of Least Invasive Intervention but for verbal answers. Doing so increases the level of support incrementally, reserving the possibility of giving the pupil more support to meet your expectation each time, but without jumping straight to the maximum amount of support and thus needlessly compromising Think Ratio for the pupil. It eliminates the barriers to full sentence answers incrementally, moving from tackling ‘hasn’t’ to ‘won’t’ to ‘can’t. Our first response should therefore assume the pupil has simply forgotten the expectation:

• Not accepting fragments of sentences as answers, and where pupils answer in fragments, repeating the expectation: “In a full sentence please”;

This is hard, especially if the pupil has answered ‘correctly’ (“1066, Sir.”), or you know that the particular pupil who answered may find it difficult to answer in full sentences. However, a simple reminder, followed by a pause to give the pupil thinking time, may yield a self-correction and the required full sentence answer.

However, if the pupil still doesn’t meet the expectation, the next step is to assume they can, but are refusing to:

• If a pupil still does not answer in a full sentence, referring them back to the ‘speaking frame’ and giving them time to reformulate their answer;

If a pupil can but doesn’t answer in a full sentence, then referring them back to the given speaking frame, or the tip about using the question to phrase the answer, removes their ability to pretend they can’t. Again, allowing a pause while they use the prompt to formulate their answer should hopefully yield the full sentence answer that is expected.

If still no full sentence answer is forthcoming, we move on to assuming the pupils can’t answer thus. Clearly, distinguishing between won’t and can’t is hard: we can’t see inside pupils’ heads. As you get to know a class your ability to judge which of these two applies will increase. In addition, over time, as you insist on the pupils meeting your expectation of full sentence answers, you should be increasingly confident that when pupils don’t meet it it is because they can’t, rather than won’t.

So, lastly:

• When a pupil is still unable to answer in a full sentence, putting their answer into a full sentence for them and asking them to repeat it back to you, as many times as it takes for them to be able to repeat it fluently.

(As an interim step you could repeat the sentence stem for them and ask them to complete it, then ask them to put it together into a full sentence themselves)

If it is still can’t and not won’t then this removes any reason no to at all, and if a pupil still doesn’t then it becomes an issue of defiance, which can be dealt with as a potential behaviour issue.

However, if it is a genuine case of can’t then this final step also removes any barrier to the pupil meeting your expectation, with the hope that as pupils become accustomed both to the expectation, and to successfully meeting it, they are able to do so increasingly independently over time.

The principle of getting the pupil to repeat the answer as many times as it takes to be able to do so fluently is an important nuance here, too. Clearly this is a matter of judgement – if a pupil is really unconfident, or really struggles to articulate themselves then building up slowly will be necessary. However, the more we can give pupils the opportunity to practise, the better. If they never do articulate themselves in full sentences, they will never learn to do so. Ensuring there is a supportive, non-judgemental culture in the class is key here.

Supporting trainees and NQTs with the return to face-to-face teaching – a TLaC technique RAG rating resource

The team of teacher educators I work in has been spending a lot of time since half term thinking about how best to support our trainees as they return to face-to-face teaching for all pupils from next week onwards. As part of this, I thought it may be useful to conduct a RAG rating exercise with trainees in some different areas of their practice. And as TLaC techniques feature so heavily in our curriculum, I further thought it made sense to focus such an audit around the main techniques we have so far covered, and that trainees will have used.

I have attached the RAG rater at the bottom of this post, and it is hopefully fairly self-explanatory. Basically, it features several areas of practice: implementing routines, managing behaviour, questioning, formative assessment, and building ratio. It then provides a description and where appropriate success criteria for using these techniques effectively, in order to remind trainees of what they have learnt about it.

It then invites them to RAG (red – amber – green) rate how effectively they thought they used the technique during term 1, before Christmas. This hopefully enables them not only to identify and remind them what they were doing effectively, but also to give them a clear idea of which techniques they need to develop. The techniques are presented in what I considered to be roughly chronological order of development, ie the first technique one would focus on in questioning would be Cold Call, followed by No Opt Out, followed by Right is Right. However, the document further asks trainees to prioritise the different techniques according to their own context – for example, Cold Call might be school policy, and so they have mastered this and students are comfortable with it, in which case they do not need to prioritise it.

The idea would be this document would of course be used as part of a professional conversation with a mentor, tutor, head of department etc, with the trainee or NQT supported to identify which techniques in one or two areas that they might focus on immediately upon their return to the classroom.

I’d be really interested to hear how people use this, if indeed they do at all, so please do comment or let me know on Twitter.

Best of luck to all trainees, NQTs and indeed all teachers for the Great Return next week!

return-to-classroom-tlac-rag-rater-1Download

Teaching on Zoom: Breaking (Out) Bad? Try these 7 tips…

On Sunday I replied to a short Twitter conversation about most of the conversation in Zoom break out rooms being about being in a Zoom break out room with the following thread of tips for making sure most of the conversation in Zoom break out rooms is not about being in a Zoom break out room:

I certainly know the feeling of time in a break out room not being used effectively, but as with all good teaching there are things we can do to reduce the likelihood of this and to maximise the effectiveness of break outs – we simply have to take the principles we know would work well in-person and apply them to online mode, taking advantage of the capabilities of Zoom as a platform.

I do all of my teaching of trainee and early career teachers on Zoom these days, so have had plenty of practice, and so I thought fleshing out the 7 tips I tweeted might be useful for those who use the platform for their teaching/training/development sessions with teachers.

What follows is a mixture of good design being built into the sessions by the fantastic team of curriculum designers who create the sessions (not me!) and things I and my colleagues delivering such sessions have incorporated into our delivery, whether through conscious design, trial and error, or reflection.

1. Keep timing tight. Too little is better than not enough.

I learnt this one explicitly from Erica Woolway, Coleen Driggs and Doug Lemov when I attended one of their TLaC Ration sessions in London back in 2017 and teachers come to implicitly know the truth of this when facilitating group or paired discussion in class. As with the best in-person groups discussions, giving too little time is better than giving too much, so that the conversation is still flowing and vibrant when bringing the group back together, rather than stilted and forced when participants ran out of insightful contributions minutes ago.

2. Have a really clear protocol for the use of the time in the room.

Don’t just give the instruction: ‘Discuss x. You have 9 minutes. Go!’. Include an explicit structure for the use of the time in the break out, eg: ‘Take 1 min to decide who will take notes & feed back. Then 6 mins to discuss. Use the final 2 mins to summarise & agree points to feed back.’ Structuring the time like this makes it more likely a focused discussion will happen for the full 6 minutes, while the administrative/logistical elements are factored in. It also makes it more likely that feed back won’t be ‘whatever the person making notes managed to capture/thinks is important’, but instead will genuinely reflect the full scope of the conversation and the contributions of all those who took part.

3. Go through this protocol before opening breakout rooms & make sure attendees have a copy they can see while in there.

Don’t just have a protocol: display it in the main room and read through it to ensure attendees have paid attention to it, and make sure they have a copy of the protocol that they can access in the breakout room – once in there they obviously cannot see the presenter’s shared screen. I do this by making PDF copies of the protocol slides and either emailing them beforehand, or dropping a link to Google Drive into the chat before I open the rooms.

4. Before opening the rooms, name who is in each room so everyone knows who to expect.

One of the points made in the tweets to which I replied was people in a break out room being unsure if everybody is there, or if they should wait for more people to join them before starting a discussion. To prevent this uncertainty, once I have created the break out rooms, I tell attendees how many people will be in each room and quickly name who is in each one. This seems to prevent the early paralysis described in the original tweet.

5. Make expectations of what to feed back crystal clear.

Include in your protocol for the discussion the specific questions you want the groups to address, and what you want to hear back from them, eg:

• Maximum of 3 strategies for managing pupil participation in discussions
• What you would change about the instructions the teacher gave in the video
• The words and phrases used in the praise shown in the video that made it precise.

If you have lots of break out rooms, and not a lot of time to feed back, ask different groups to provide feed back on specific questions, or ask the even-numbered groups to work through the questions in number order and the odd-numbered groups to work through them in reverse order. This can prevent repetition of the same points, or the final group feeling like everything they wanted to say has already been said.

6. Broadcast reminder messages into the rooms.

Zoom has a feature where you can broadcast messages into the break out rooms. I use this in two ways:

• To post timing reminders (‘1 minute in. Now move on to discussion the questions’; ‘2 mins remaining, now summarise & agree what to feed back.’)
• To post reminders of the questions to keep discussions on track.

7. Circulate through the rooms on mute & with camera off to collate batch feedback (contract this before opening the rooms).

When contracting this in the main room, explain that you do not want your appearance in a break out room to affect the discussion, and so you will have camera off and be on mute. Circulating through the rooms can help you pick up common themes, or common misconceptions. This allows for more targeted questioning by you when back in the main room and gives you the potential to provide ‘batch feed back’ to the groups, either in the form of drawing their attention to common themes or misconceptions, or giving them process feed back on the quality of their discussion or their use of time in the break outs.

Stop telling teachers to talk less! The bad advice series #1: ‘Reduce the amount of teacher talk’.

Since 2006 when I first became a head of department, through 4 years as a HOD and 5 as an assistant head, to my previous and current roles supporting trainee teachers, I have observed literally hundreds of lessons, often alongside other colleagues: heads of department, fellow senior leaders, ITT mentors and tutors. In that time, I’m confident that my ability to give high quality feedback that genuinely enables the colleagues I have observed to improve their practice has improved significantly (it would be awful if it hadn’t!).

In general, the quality of the feedback given by colleagues with whom I have observed has definitely improved, as the profession has embraced more research-informed practice – such as learnings from cognitive science (https://deansforimpact.org/resources/the-science-of-learning/), rejected hoary old myths – such as the cone of learning (https://www.educationcorner.com/the-learning-pyramid.html), and applied insights from literature around effective feedback (https://www.ambition.org.uk/blog/incremental-coaching-next-big-thing-teacher-development/) and deliberate practice.

However, there still exists a group of phrases that, when I hear them uttered during verbal feedback, or see them written on a lesson observation feedback form, cause me to shudder. I plan to write a post about each of them. I will show why I believe these phrases to be unhelpful and unpick the well-intentioned sentiments that may lie behind them. I will then make suggestions as to how such sentiments may be articulated more clearly and precisely, so as to leave the teacher who has been observed with concrete, actionable feedback that will genuinely move their practice forward.

The first phrase I want to tackle is: ‘Reduce the amount of teacher talk’. Phrased like this, such advice is neither use nor ornament to a teacher, must less to trainee teachers with whom I work.

Why is this unhelpful?

Where to start? Reduce it by how much? Why? What should it be replaced with? (Usually in the observer’s mind it’s pupils ‘doing’ something, anything rather than listening to the expert in the room.)

The first and arguably only function of feedback should be to comment on the extent to which the lesson was effective in enabling pupils to know, understand or do whatever the teacher intended them to. That should be our starting point from which to work backwards, not whether any arbitrary list of features were present or boxes were ticked. ’Reduce teacher talk’ fails this test as it addresses what the teacher is doing with no consideration of its effect.

Nor is an arbitrary measurement of the amount of teacher talk appropriate. Telling a teacher to reduce the amount they talk in a lesson (and it presumably means the amount they talk from the front to the whole class, rather than while they are circulating with individual pupils) just tells them you think they talked too much and gives no account of the quality or impact of their talk. This will likely lead to them randomly reconfiguring activities that may require significant teacher input and guidance so that they are ‘pupil-led’ or allow for ‘independent learning’. Which in turn has the potential to stymie learning as pupils struggle without such guidance.

Finally, ‘reduce teacher talk’ is unhelpful because it is vague – it doesn’t distinguish between giving instructions, explaining concepts or asking questions, whilst failing to give clear guidance on what to replace the talk with. Which bits of talk were inappropriate or unnecessary? How would the aim of that part of the lesson be achieved differently?

What sentiments may lie behind this advice?

There are several well-intentioned reasons this advice may be given:

1. A concern that the teacher is working really, really hard in lessons and will be unable to sustain such an intense teaching style. Reducing the amount they talk and setting more tasks that pupils complete in pairs/groups or independently will reduce the physical demands on the teacher and be better for their wellbeing.
2. A desire for the teacher to be more concise when giving instructions or explanations.
3. The belief that pupils learn better when they find things out for themselves or that we should be in the business of creating ‘independent learners’.
4. The consideration that too much time spent listening will lead to pupils losing focus and concentration, and thus chatting or talking over the teacher.

How could this piece of advice be made more effective?

This depends on the motivation behind it. Addressing each of the points above:

1. This is a legitimate concern. Better feedback would be to ask the teacher to identify opportunities in their lessons to set pupils short, focused tasks at appropriate times – for example a 30 second turn & talk to rehearse their answers to a question, or to structure their lesson so that pupils spend time independently practising – though again only at the point they are able to (think Rosenshine’s recommendation of achieving an 80% success rate).
2. This should be addressed through careful scripting of instructions and explanations, followed by deliberate practice which enables the teacher to practise delivering them. This will improve the conciseness and effectiveness of these examples of teacher talk, which in turn will improve learning in the lesson, as well as having the incidental effect of reducing the amount of teacher talk during those episodes.
3. This one is well-meaning in that it may be a sincerely-held belief. Unfortunately, it is also wrong. The weight of evidence is clear that minimally-guided instruction is less effective than teacher-led instruction. If this belief is the motivation behind the advice to reduce teacher talk then that advice should be challenged, with a good place to start being the seminal article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark.
4. This is a thorny one. It may be true that pupils choose to misbehave when expected to give their full attention as part of whole-class, teacher-led instruction. Unfortunately for those pupils, such instruction is the most effective type and so the long-term aim should be to support the teacher to create a culture in which pupils do pay full attention in order to reap its benefits. However, as stated, this is a long-term aim, and it is also not entirely within an individual teacher’s capability to achieve if the whole-school culture is not supportive of this aim. In the short term, therefore, the teacher’s best bet is to script and practise their responses to pupils talking over them, calling out or going off-task, so as to minimise the disruption to the whole class and efficiently re-direct such pupils to the expected behaviours. In addition, working with the teacher to make the explanation phases of lessons more interactive, through the scripting of well-timed questions and building the habits of discussion, will reduce off-task behaviour.

My second favourite action step: Means of Participation

Almost a year after I wrote my first and until now only post on my work with trainee teachers as a teach educator using the TLaC Brighten Lines technique, that post recently received a boost when Adam Boxer tweeted about having used it in a training session on behaviour management. Having been reminded of the power of sharing good practice, I have been prompted to write this second post on my second favourite action step: means of participation.

I must start by saying that just like my post on Brighten Lines, what follows is drawn from the brilliant work of the Teach Like a Champion team. In particular, the idea of ‘means of participation’ came from a two-day TLaC Ratio workshop I attended in October 2017 with Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway and Colleen Driggs. So I am shamelessly reproducing their work here and explaining how I have applied with my trainees.

Means of participation is a deceptively simple concept: communicating clearly and unambiguously to pupils how you expect to manage their participation in a phase of questioning during a lesson.

I am disappointed to admit that far too often in my 13 years in the classroom I would exasperatedly wonder why pupils were shouting answers out and I was having to remind them again and again that in my classroom shouting out was not accepted. Means of participation made me realise that more often than not it was my failure to make clear what I expected that was the root cause of such calling out, rather than any malign intent on the part of my pupils.

It is a scene I see repeated in the classrooms of trainee and early career teachers too. How often have we all simply announced questions into the ether of the classroom without being clear that we expect hands up, or hands down so we can Cold Call? Means of participation also enables us to explicitly consider other ways that pupils can approach a question, such as through Turn and Talk, Everybody Writes, Think-Pair-Share and so on.

Sounds simple, but I find when working with my trainees, drilling down to the precise phrase or gesture they will use to signal to pupils what is expected, when and how they will communicate this and how they will respond to calling out or unnecessary hands up is the key. This kind of specificity is exactly what means of participation is designed to do, as with so many TLaC techniques that isolate specific actions and behaviours, and makes the technique practisable.

Here is the resource I use (adapted from the one used in the TLaC Ration workshop) to scaffold this process for the teachers with whom I work:

Breaking a teaching skill down in this way, scripting the different parts, practising the specific examples until they can be delivered automatically so the technique can then be used more flexibly over time in the classroom is incredibly powerful. In this case, it both reduces the incidence of shouting out and gives teachers an easy way to challenge those who do not comply: they can give a positive correction by simply reminding pupils of the expectation previously stated.

And when teachers have thought really carefully about the questions they want to ask, both to check understanding and prompt their pupils’ thinking, using this technique helps to ensure they can hear their pupils’ answers clearly, understand their thinking, uncover potential misconceptions and respond as necessary, thus improving pupils’ learning. It also reduces conflict in the classroom by removing hopefully eventually) the need for pupils to be told off for shouting out or reminded to put their hand up.

 

The Schleicher Fallacy*: partially right problem, totally wrong answer

 

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – administers of the infamous PISA tests (a kind of educational Mirror of Erised, for those looking into them tend to magically see evidence for their heart’s truest educational desire) – recently organised the eighth International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Having attended, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, Mary Bousted, penned an article for the TES that made the case for moving away from rote memorisation and teaching to the test in favour of teaching pupils 21^st Century Skills (now such a Thing they seem to be capitalised as a proper noun) as part of a ‘knowledge and skills curriculum’.

Greg Ashman has already argued convincingly that this is not really possible, pointing out that to place 21^st Century Skills on an equal footing with knowledge we would be required to ‘demonstrate that they exist, that they can be improved by a form of training that is different to the standard tasks that schools already deploy in the purpose of teaching knowledge, and that these forms of training represent viable approaches that schools can deploy. Despite plenty of OECD waffle, none of this has been demonstrated.’

However, I think there is another way in which Dr Bousted’s argument is wrong, which I’m going to call the Schleicher Fallacy, after the OECD’s edu-guru Andreas Schleicher. It is a fallacy committed by many a writer on education issues, with Bousted being merely the most recent. The fallacy goes like this:

• In England high stakes accountability measures mean that schools tend to teach to the test in order to maximise outcomes;
• This leads to a narrowing of the curriculum and rote memorisation at the expense of deep learning and the development of understanding;
• To fix this, we need to balance the teaching of knowledge with the teaching of 21^st Century Skills to ensure pupils leave school with more than just a clutch of numbers on a set of certificates.

As the title of this blog suggests, I think this diagnosis is partially correct, while the prescription is wholly mistaken.

Yes, schools (lots of them, not all) ‘teach to the test’, by which I mean they treat the sample as the domain and therefore prioritise exam practice-style activities above ensuring their pupils have wide, deep knowledge in the academic disciplines they are studying. To borrow Daisy Chrisodoulou’s argument, they prepare their pupils to run a marathon by getting them to run a marathon every lesson. They do this because they want to get the highest possible grades for their pupils and believe this is the best way of doing so (as well as wanting to maximise P8 and A8 scores and keep the Ofsted/DfE wolves from the door). They are wrong to do this, but for the right (moral, ethical) reasons.

By contrast, the Schleicher Fallacy is right, for the wrong reasons (or partially right as I said above). Teaching to the test is not the same thing as, nor an inevitable consequence of, a focus on knowledge in the curriculum. It is the result of a lack of understanding of assessment theory and the role knowledge plays in begetting more knowledge, combined with the pernicious effects of high stakes accountability (which I think almost everybody is beginning to agree is a serious problem).

Where the Schleicher Fallacy is totally wrong is in its proposed solution to this problem. The answer is not to attempt the impossible and teach a set of nebulous, ill-defined 21^st Century Skills which seem more about preparing pupils for the workplace than any genuine desire to educate them – an idea skewered brilliantly by Daniel Willingham with this recent tweet:

For schools the answer is instead to plan coherent curricula across the entire spread of key stage 1 to 4 that define, sequence, assess, revisit, and embed precise knowledge across the academic disciplines. This will make it more likely that pupils gain wide, deep knowledge that can be flexibly deployed when it is sampled in KS2 statutory assessments and GCSE exams. The answer for education policy is to ensure both that these assessments are fit for purpose – the current KS2 SATs reading papers and GCSE English Language exams (among others) don’t seem to me to be so – and that the present pernicious accountability measures are nuanced to give schools the space to teach the curriculum.

Working with trainees: my favourite action step – extending ‘Brighten Lines’ into a comprehensive routine

In my work with trainee teachers, I draw heavily (as the programme I work for does) on techniques from Teach Like a Champion, by Doug Lemov. There is one technique that I talk about so often with my trainees that any mention of it now brings barely suppressed smirks and playful eye rolls: Brighten Lines.

In TLaC this technique is explained thus: ‘Ensure that changes in activities and other mileposts are perceived clearly by making beginnings and endings of activities visible and crisp’. There is a further explanation of it here: http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/brightening-lines-video/, along with a video of participants at a TLaC training session practising the clean start aspect of the technique.

The reasons I talk about Brighten Lines so often are two-fold: firstly many of my trainees have still not mastered it (though some very effectively have) and secondly it is incredibly powerful – in fact I would argue it is one of the absolutely fundamental building blocks of effective teacher practice for new and trainee teachers working in predominantly challenging schools (as my trainees do) for establishing a culture in their classroom in which pupils follow instructions and complete tasks quickly and efficiently when given an activity to complete.

In focusing on Brighten Lines I have tried to develop a comprehensive routine that I can share with trainees that goes beyond the narrow (though excellent) examples seen in the clip above and that takes in giving clear instructions, having a clean start and then continuing on to enforce the start after giving the ‘go’ signal, whatever that may be.

The routine has 10 steps and includes some other TLaC techniques, as follows –

When setting pupils off on a task, once you have their full attention (pens down, eyes on you) in absolute silence and with you stood at the front of the room:

1. Give clear instructions, ensuring economy of language
2. Give a clear time limit for the task
3. Ask one or more pupils to repeat the instructions back to you, as well as the time limit (an opportunity to check on those pupils who like to feign ignorance of the instructions and remove this as an excuse not to begin)
4. Ask pupils ‘Is there anybody who is still unsure what to do?’
5. Repeat, very briefly, the task and the time limit
6. Give a clear ‘GO’ signal (perhaps include a pause beforehand to build anticipation, or include a brief preparatory instruction like ‘pens in hand…go!’
7. Stand still – do not move
8. Very obviously scan the room – (Be Seen Looking) – to check whether pupils have begun
9. Narrate compliance – praise those who begin straight away (‘James has started. Well done, Courtney. Thank you for starting Ahmed.’)
10. Anonymously challenge the non-starters (‘Just waiting for two pupils to start’, ‘90% of us have begun, let’s have 100%’)

I tell trainees to remain on the same spot, at the front of the room, until 100% of pupils have started, or until they think there are any pupils who will not begin without the teacher approaching them for a one to one conversation.

I have seen this routine used incredibly effectively. It can transform lessons from a battle scene where a teacher spends the five minutes given to a task circulating the room trying to persuade pupils to begin, to one where there is a perceptible ‘snap to it’ when the go signal is given and pupils begin working in earnest. In extending the idea of ‘Brighten Lines’ to take in the whole act of giving instructions, starting an activity and enforcing the expectation that pupils begin to complete it, the script becomes a comprehensive, practise-able routine that trainees can internalise and automate so that it begins to come naturally and is implemented every time they set pupils off to work independently.

brighten-lines-planning-practice-resourceDownload

A traditionalist case against setting/for mixed ability grouping (at least in subjects which are cumulative as opposed to hierarchical)

This paper, by Professor Becky Francis and her research team at the IOE, which described setting of pupils in English schools as being a form of ‘symbolic violence’ against those who find themselves in the bottom sets, has provoked much discussion on my edu-Twitter timeline. I like to think, despite inevitable cognitive biases, that I follow a good range of people across the great Prog-Trad divide and so get a relatively balanced picture of discussions and debates when they arise.

From what I have seen, views on the paper have conformed broadly to type: those who I would characterise as progressives leapt on the paper’s conclusions, using it as further evidence of the inequity of ability setting and arguing for the virtues of mixed ability teaching; those of a more traditionalist bent, broadly supportive of ability grouping across the curriculum, have questioned the use of the hyperbolic phrase ‘symbolic violence’, as well the validity and reliability of the research, which seems to have largely drawn on interviews with a small number of pupils about their feelings about being in bottom sets.

So far, so standard. (One really interesting and typically nuanced response came from Michael Fordham, who pointed out that a discussion of the merits or otherwise of different types of pupil groupings has to take into account differences between subject disciplines to be worthwhile and precise. I’ll return to this later.)

In recent months I have read and thought a lot about class in education. I feel that much of what I have read and listened to has been better at diagnosing the difficulties facing working class children and the problems created for them by the education system than in prescribing remedies and solutions. One recurrent theme in these discussions is that of ability setting, which is largely viewed similarly to the way Francis and her team view it: as pernicious for working class children, who disproportionately find themselves in the lower sets; reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities and breeding in the pupils themselves a sense of inferiority and hopelessness.

Many commentators have pointed out that pupils’ views are of course only part of the full picture we need when weighing the evidence on the effectiveness or otherwise of ability grouping, and extrapolating from such a small sample as the IOE researchers have raises big questions about validity and reliability. I agree with these criticisms.

And yet. In all of my experience over a decade and a half in schools and education more widely it is clear to see that bottom sets get the worst of, well, everything. Their target grades are low because of their KS2 results; they tend to get the weakest teachers, or supply teachers; behaviour tends to be a challenge, and so often teachers resign themselves to babysitting and crowd control at the expense of education; they have bowdlerised content in the name of ‘differentiation’ that leaves them with huge gaps in their knowledge.

I am no expert in the research evidence on setting. However, from what I have picked up from following discussions involving those more learned that me is that the patchy evidence we have shows setting is a net positive for those at the top end of the ability range and a net negative for those at the bottom end. However, the conclusions from such research are flimsy because studies rarely take into account the factors I mentioned above: quality of teachers, quality of instruction and quality of curriculum

And it is the last of those that I think is the key to a traditionalist argument against setting. I don’t think we can repeat enough the mantra of ‘behaviour and curriculum, behaviour and curriculum’ as being the two key foci for school leaders if they want to provide the best possible education to all the young people they serve, and in doing so shift the bell curve to the right and close attainment gaps. At the risk of being simplistic, assuming that schools can secure excellent behaviour in bottom sets because they establish a culture of high expectations and enforce them (and we know this can be done), then curriculum is where we need to have a laser like focus. And if we have pupils set by ability then we will almost inevitably have what Christine Counsell has termed ‘differentiation by curricular input’.

The argument I have been grappling with but struggling to articulate, which I think Christine’s phrase beautifully encapsulates, is that bottom sets will almost inevitably be given a dumbed-down curriculum of less, and less powerful, content. The great contribution educational traditionalism, allied to emerging understandings of cognitive science, has made in the past decade to improving what happens in schools is to argue for the centrality of knowledge, or the curricular ‘what’ rather than the pedagogical ‘how’.

So if we are serious that all pupils can and should learn a coherent body of knowledge in subject disciplines, then why do we need ability grouping in subjects in which content is organised cumulatively? We can deliver the content to all pupils. In my subject of history, that means ensuring all pupils know key dates and people from the past, as well as developing sophisticated understandings of substantive concepts such as ‘monarchy’ and ‘The Church’ through repeated exposure to such terms in multiple contexts across their years of study. (NB: I do not apply this argument to maths and MFL, in which content is organised differently and hierarchically, as pointed out by Michael Fordham, and which in my understanding makes mixed ability teaching very much harder – there may be other subjects for which this is true).

If we also follow Daisy Christodoulou’s insights about assessment in cumulative subjects, there is a further argument that ability grouping is not necessary. We can use ongoing, formative assessment to find out how well pupils retain the micro-bits of content we provide to them, before seeing differentiation come through more extended summative assessments, which will almost inevitably produce a bell-curve of attainment when judged comparatively.

In the case of both of these arguments – delivering the same curriculum to all pupils and using an assessment model that complements such an aim – they seem to me to negate the upsides of ability grouping (differentiation in easier, content can be targeted more carefully), while tackling the problems (pupils viewing being in bottom sets negatively, the tendency to dumb down).

I am painfully aware that these arguments may be naïve, or just downright wrong. There are probably many issues and themes I have not considered. There are also caveats, for example what about pupils who cannot read being in the same class as those who are preternaturally bright? I don’t have all the answers but I wanted to make the argument and invite further discussion. Please join in!

 

Disciplinary knowledge and (in my next post) a call for unity.

I feel privileged to be a history teacher because of the level of professional dialogue that goes on amongst the history teaching community, both through Teaching History magazine but also more recently through blogs and Twitter. I have learnt a hell of a lot about the discipline and how to teach it more effectively from people committed to this most wonderful yet infuriatingly layered and nuanced subject, and committed to sharing their insights and expertise. This blog is in two parts and is going to meander, but it should make it to the sea eventually. Please bear with me and take it in the spirit in which it is intended.

I’m thinking out loud about where I am up to in the development of my own thinking about history teaching (this post) and in the process I’m going to issue a call for unity amongst those who think deeply about the subject (next post), as well as a rallying cry for us to make the case for the discipline in the face of practices that undermine or take away from it.

This rather zig zag thought process began with me pondering the concept of disciplinary knowledge in history, which I have lately found to be something of a chimera*. The fact that I have said in the first paragraph of this post that I have learnt a huge amount about ‘the discipline’ surely proves the existence of ‘disciplinary knowledge’, of history’s disciplinary distinctiveness. And yet, I have been at something of a loss to pin down exactly what it is, while attempts to get others to do so have left me frustrated at the vagueness of claims that it is ‘historical thinking’ or represented simply by the second order concepts (cause & consequence, interpretations etc) that we take for granted, are very general and which were enshrined in the old KS3 National Curriculum levels.

So, some history: my career as a history teacher (and for a time head of history) has been a journey from one who unthinkingly structured the curriculum and schemes of work around the second order concepts, giving little thought to the nature or amount of substantive knowledge and absolutely no thought at all to how that knowledge was to be retained over time, to my current position where, for ease of characterisation, I am a guilty-as-charged, no-apologies, fully-paid-up member of the neo-Trad knowledge brigade.

In my original incarnation I didn’t think of the second order concepts as ‘disciplinary knowledge’ because I didn’t know such a concept existed. In fact, I didn’t really think much at all, and definitely not about the right things, which was the problem. My training as a teacher left me utterly without an understanding of history as a discipline, as enacted in schools. This is something I am still recovering from and which held me back from being a better teacher more quickly. And so ‘second order concepts’ were taken at face value as the things we did in history in schools. Flowing from that limited knowledge of and insight into the discipline, and the unconsciously constructivist flavouring of my teacher training in general, further compounded by the unconsciously constructivist ecosystem of the schools I taught in, came all sorts of (now I look back at them) horrendous practices in terms of assessment and pedagogy.

The false consciousness of believing that progression in history could be conceived of as getting better at the second order concepts, de-coupled from substantive knowledge, and that this would be a linear progression that looks good on a line graph. Turning desks on their sides and letting pupils throw paper balls at each other in an effort to recreate ‘what it was like to fight in the trenches’ because it was a bottom set and I didn’t know how to get them to write good history (don’t get me started on recreating the ‘middle passage’…). You name the ridiculous, chances are I’ve done it. Mea culpa. I would say I was one of those Christine Counsell talked about at #WLFShistory, who threw the baby out with the bath water in attempting to redress the balance between knowledge and ‘skills’, except I didn’t even know there was a baby being bathed because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. This only got worse initially when I became an assistant head and therefore had less time to think about the discipline.

Over the past seven years I have become increasingly convinced by the argument for knowledge. That is, an understanding of the insights we have gained from the likes of ED Hirsch and Daniel Willingham (themselves bringing those insights from others and popularising them in education) about the way the mind and memory works, how knowledge is key to building schema which enable understanding and the case for knowledge enabling social justice.

This increasing awareness of the importance of knowledge was seeping into my history teaching while I was still an assistant head, in 2014 and the early part of 2015. I wrote an article for Teaching History 157 in December 2014 about how I had used low stakes testing to secure pupils’ substantive knowledge during the teaching of the Civil Rights movement and the impact I felt this had on their ability to explain and make arguments about the past.

I then had about a year out of schools (still reading, still debating) before returning to the classroom for 2 days per week as a history teacher around a year ago. I was now able to focus entirely on teaching history and therefore to bring my new perspectives to bear on my practice. My understanding of the historical discipline was deeper than it had been back in 2010 when I was last a head of history, but clearly still in need of development as I applied my enthusiasm for knowledge to the subject. Then a few weeks ago I attended #WLFShistory and felt like all my Christmases had come at once with, as I explained in my post reflecting on the day, the importance of knowledge being the cri de coeur of the conference.

And then I noticed a bit of a reaction against the conference on Twitter, both from some who had been there and some who hadn’t. Firstly there was the age old cry of ‘but OF COURSE knowledge is important, nobody ever said otherwise’, the latter part of which is patently untrue, even while those saying it clearly do value substantive knowledge highly themselves. Then there was a lot said about how substantive knowledge on its own was necessary but not sufficient, and how history was a very particular discipline with its own ‘disciplinary knowledge’ that had to be allied to the substantive for one to be good at and get better at history.

Before 2013 I wouldn’t have had the reference points to understand, consider and evaluate this argument. The second order concepts were the ‘skills’ of history (I didn’t conceive of them as knowledge-based) and that that was that. So it is only recently I have begun to consider the idea of ‘disciplinary knowledge’ and as I stated above, I have struggled to nail it down as a concept.

I think (I hope) a breakthrough of sorts came this week when I read this blog post by Richard Kennett about the role and importance of disciplinary knowledge. Whilst I don’t agree with everything Richard argues – I don’t, for example, think it is merely a semantics issue that I recoil from instead calling it ‘skills’ – the post and the follow up discussion with Richard and Jim Carroll convinced me that disciplinary knowledge exists, as distinct from substantive knowledge. I still worry that in accepting that the two types of knowledge are separate but intertwined there is potential to remember the former (separate) but forget the latter part (intertwined) of that formula and once again slip into knowledge-lite, or knowledge-free, conceptions of ‘history skills’ (hence it is not a semantic issue).

(By the way, I also still think it is a straw man argument to suggest that some want to merely fill pupils’ heads with as many facts as possible without giving much thought to what pupils *do* with that knowledge. I’m now very clear that the knowledge advocates I know conceive of the substantive and the disciplinary as *knowledge* and so include both when making their argument.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is this (and this owes much to the magpied thoughts of many history teachers I have read, tweeted and spoken to over the past year or so): disciplinary knowledge (for me) is about what historians do, the approach they take, the questions they ask about the past – I’m really taken (weeks after first hearing the term as I suppose it took more reading and thinking to assimilate it into what one may called my schema relating to ‘disciplinary knowledge’) by Alex Ford’s notion of ‘lenses’. Disciplinary knowledge is the way we interrogate sources and the way we define and classify causes, consequences, change and continuity. I feel much more confident now about unpacking what those lenses actually are, what that knowledge is. Indeed I look forward to it.

And yet, this breakthrough has also re-confirmed my conviction about the importance of substantive knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge does not make sense in a vacuum, it is reliant upon deep substantive knowledge to operate authentically and to have any value. Substantive knowledge needs to trot a nose ahead of disciplinary; it has to come first, with disciplinary knowledge applied to it in context. To put it bluntly, a pupil with huge amounts of substantive knowledge is likely to naturally ask better questions about the past even without a conscious understanding of ‘lenses’ than a pupil with limited substantive knowledge but who can confidently articulate what the second order concepts are.

For proof of this, spend a summer marking any GCSE exams that have source-based questions on them and weep at the number of times you read that a source is ‘bias’ [sic], or is not useful because it is a piece of propaganda. As Michael Fordham has argued, better historians (of a period, a country, an event) are better historians because they know more than others. Having more substantive knowledge makes pupils’ use of disciplinary knowledge more effective. The more they know about an event, the better questions they will ask about that event and the better they will be able to distinguish between the different types of causes of that event. The disciplinary relies on and is enhanced by the substantive.

So that’s where I am. As ever, I’d welcome comments and critiques. In my next post I am going to explain how, to sound a little cheesy, we thinking history teachers have more in common than divides us and make the case for continuing to debate these terms in order to refine and sharpen our understandings, but also to move that debate on to reach those who are stuck where I was seven years ago, not knowing what they don’t know.

*as an aside, do any other school disciplines have such a keen sense that there is something distinct about their subject, or is history unique?

Building ‘abstract generalisations’ to help yr 8 write like historians – part 2

In my last post I described how I had begun to implement the insights I gained from Jim Carroll’s session at #WLFShistory, by helping my pupils to build abstract generalisations that could be used as the reasons for why Britain’s population grew between 1750 and 1900.

In yesterday’s lesson we took these statements and began to explore how we would use them in an essay answering the question: ‘Why did Britain’s population increase rapidly between 1750 and 1900?’.

Firstly I explored the idea of nominalisation, explaining to my pupils that historians (and much academic writing) uses nominalisations to express meaning, using the example below and showing them how once a phrase has been nominalised, historians can finesse it quite easily – ‘an increase’ can become ‘rapid’, ‘massive’ or ‘gradual’.

Asking them to bear this in mind, I then suggested the following structure for their response:

I told them I would help them with the introduction but then they had to write three paragraphs on birth rate and three on death rate – one for each abstract generalisation we had built.

I then wanted to give them a structure for each paragraph and it was here that I ran up against the limit of my own growing (explicit) understanding of ‘how historians write’, as well as not wanting to cognitively overload them with new information. I decided I would base the paragraph structure I was looking for on P-E-E (which I have criticised heavily in the past) as it was familiar to them in the form of P-E-A (A for analysis, a semantic difference).

I told them I wanted them to think of the structure as P-A-E, with the ‘P’ starting with each of the abstract generalisations. In other words, I was looking for something like:

Point + analysis – Improvements in the care of pregnant women meant that more pregnancies resulted in live births, which led to an increase in the birth rate and therefore a rise in population.

Evidence – (they would draw this evidence (if there was any to add) from the original grid we had used to form the generalisations).

I was dissatisfied with this, but quite honestly hadn’t the time to think carefully enough about how I would ideally like them to write to come up with any other structure, so it had to suffice for now, until my own understanding grows.

In order to generate the ‘analysis’ part of the paragraph, we discussed the abstract generalisations again and came up with some possible links and phrases to use (apologies for the green board marker):

Finally, I showed them the introduction I had written and asked them if they could improve it:

I was really please that they spotted what I hoped they would, which was the two opportunities to nominalise: to change ‘the birth rate…went up’ to ‘there was an increase in the birth rate’ and ‘the death rate…went down’ to ‘there was a decrease in the death rate’.

They then cracked on with the birth rate section of the answer, with the death rate section to be complete when I next see them in just under 2 weeks. I shall post examples of their work to show to what extent they were able to produce good historical writing.