Category: Teaching and Learning

This is a follow up to last week’s introduction to teaching live lessons online.

The big takeaway for me this week is that I have realised that being forced to teach online will change my classroom practice. Sometimes it takes a shock to bring about innovation. Here are three approaches that I want to continue when I return to teaching in person:

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1. Ask students to write down their thoughts / strategy in the middle of an example.

I started doing this on Zoom as a way to check that the whole class are concentrating, but it has proved so much more useful than this.

• I can see what everyone is thinking, give individual feedback and ask the students who have the most useful responses to share them with the class.
• Similarly, I can see who doesn’t understand. This gives me a hint as to who might need extra help when others start.
• It gives an opportunity for all students to express their ideas and show off their understanding, reducing the frustration sometimes encountered when working through a problem with a mixed-ability class.
• Forcing students to write a sentence tests whether they can use topic-specific vocabulary to explain their ideas- something that is crucial if they’re going to be able to help each other.

It’s so easy to do this online, it’s a shame that it’s going to be harder in person. I think it will work OK with mini-whiteboards.

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2. Decide on the core questions that all students must complete before we move on.

I am used to setting questions to incorporate a wide range of abilities, starting easy and getting gradually more difficult. The first set of questions I set to students on Dr Frost Maths was like this. Then I realised that some students were just never going to complete it.

This felt unsatisfactory – I didn’t want students have incomplete tasks on their ‘to do’ list, so I have really pared back the questions that I set to all students to just include a few key questions. This has really made me think about what I want everyone to do.

Additionally, it has helped to control when I move on from a topic to the next. Usually I move on when I feel from the work I am seeing that all pupils have a good understanding of the topic (a word I try to avoid because it is so overused: ‘mastery’). Having the data in front of me on the screen has made me realise that some pupils take much longer than I realised to answer the questions that I considered ‘standard’ when planning the lesson. They definitely haven’t mastered the topic.

DFM has been great for this as I can see exactly who has done the questions, and it also allows for plenty of extensions, including lots of revision and interleaving, for students who complete the set work quickly. I may continue to use it in the classroom.

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3. Test prior knowledge with an online quiz or individual questions.

During the past couple of years, I’ve been really focussing on testing prior knowledge before teaching something new. I have done this mostly on mini-whiteboards. This works ok and allows me to provide immediate feedback, but students generally recall knowledge at varied rates and so it is tough for me to help those who need it, whilst challenging others.

Instead, I should do this with individual tasks. Why on earth have I not been doing this?! It allows me more time to work with the students who need it, and gives others opportunity for extension.

Whilst online, I’ve been using Quizizz for this, mostly to provide a change from DFM. I would consider sticking with this in the future – it provides a clear bar chart showing who is doing well and who probably needs extra help.

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Other points, related to my first, were made by Beth Plaw and Heather Scott on twitter: Students have been asking lots of sensible questions and often phrasing them more carefully and specifically than usual.

Next week I’ll be back, with more tips on Zoom, including how to get students working in groups and monitor this, as well as how point 2 above has encouraged better differentiation and useful collaboration with my Head of Learning support. And hopefully more…

I made this video to share my ideas after a week of teaching online lessons. Thank you to my colleagues Harriet, Jodie and Sandra for acting as my students!

My school has decided to keep to the standard timetable, so I teach lessons at the same time I normally would. The students generally seem to like this as it gives structure and normality to the day. I met with the parents of my tutor group after school on Friday and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive too – they were really impressed by how occupied their children were, and hence how they could get their own work / chores done! One change we have made is to reduce each of our lessons by 5 minutes, to give everyone a bit more time away from the screen in between lessons.

Feedback from the students is that they much prefer live lessons to pre-planned and assigned work / videos as it gives them more of the interaction that they would normally get. I perhaps only used this a little in the video, but ‘narrate the positive’ has been more useful than ever, as I can provide commentary on the progress I see online which helps to motivate students who may otherwise feel rather lonely.

I think it’s better to spend less time than you usually would on whole-class teaching and provide links to videos, along with more individual or small group help. What’s nice about the Zoom setup is that the whole class can listen to (and watch, if they wish) any small-group tuition you are providing.

At first, I found it hard to manage a large group and would have most of the class muted most of the time, but over the course of the week, I can work with larger and larger groups of students unmuted, as we all grow accustomed to the process. Nevertheless, some lessons have been slightly stressful, as I struggle to help all pupils that need it and keep track of what a whole class are doing. But then this can happen with normal lessons too! I have read lots of concerns from leaders about workload. This definitely could be a problem for teachers who are having to look after their own children, but for me, work has been easier than usual (hence, I have time to write this blog!)

My back-up plan of extension work was initially Dr Frost Maths, but this was struggling under the strain of unprecedented demand. Instead I set some non internet-based problems, but it was difficult to assess how well individuals worked on them. I think I will return to DFM now the servers have been upgraded as it gives such a great overview of the work pupils have done and has a huge bank of challenging problems. I have also invested a lot of time to program my schemes of work into it (it’s very flexible in this regard – which is why I chose it over the competitors) and hope that this is now going to pay off!

One point that I couldn’t remember in the middle of making this video was the option to “view side by side” which moves the videos of students from the top, to the side. You can then slide the bar across to reduce the area given to your shared screen (as you don’t need to see it) and increase the number of students you can see. I have added this to the written guide which you can find here:

Next steps: Try out the ‘Breakout Rooms’ feature of Zoom in order to set groups of pupils working together on problems. Think of some tasks which get students away from the screen for some time – I may leave this one to subjects other than maths, but if you have any ideas, let me know.

Links Mentioned in the video:

• www.zoom.us
• www.quizizz.com
• www.drfrostmaths.com
• www.classroom.google.com

And some other useful links:

• www.goformative.com
• www.eedi.com

A first for me in my new school is the concept of a taster visit – a pupil comes along to school for the day to help decide if they want to join the school. It’s interesting to see how children from other schools approach problems and a recent visit made me realise how important a particular feature of my Scheme of Work is… Forming Equations.

The taster-day student was tackling the problem above. He was doing the whole thing on his calculator; I could see that he had some good ideas, but there were just too many steps. I encouraged him to use pen and paper but he just started writing down the steps that he was typing into his calculator.

The problem: He couldn’t write down the sine or cosine rule, substitute and solve the resulting equation. This skill is crucial when you get to a level (which everyone does eventually) where you can’t solve problems in your head.

I wanted to shout at him… Form a Flippin’ Equation! Why do students struggle to do so? I feel that it’s because they haven’t been trained to.

My solution, as so often: Follow the Highgate way. Teach forming equations as an independent topic, at least once per year, and insist that students employ the strategy within other topics at every possible opportunity.

To find out more about the first part of this approach, see my resources on forming equations.

The second part is to reinforce this when teaching other topics. I think the first place I’d usually do this is when teaching students about circles, although this could also be applied to simpler shapes too. Perhaps another argument for teaching more number and algebra before shape?

For example, I would insist that pupils solve the following circle problem like this:

I do sometimes encounter some resistance to this level of detail – inevitably some students just want to do 12 divided by pi and write down the answer. In order to head this off, I ask students to solve the following problem before I teach this:

This is a difficult problem, which students at this level can’t normally solve, and this helps to provide the motivation to practise this strategy.

Moving forward, students can apply the same approach when applying Pythagoras’ Theorem:

If you continue to insist that pupils write their solutions like this whenever the opportunity arises, you’ll give them a powerful tool which will enable them to solve difficult problems.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all schools teach this already. But based on pupils who move into my classes, I am doubtful.

I will leave you with the work of Cora, in the first term of year 10. I’ve taught her for 2 years and so she has been through the Highgate-style forming-and-solving training. I was so impressed with how she made such light work of this problem, which normally stumps even very capable students.

One of the neatest ways of describing approaches to teaching that I’ve heard recently came from Jo Morgan on one of Craig’s podcasts: Maths teachers usually operate in on of three modes: I do, we do, you do.

It’s an oversimplification, but I like the way you can categorise approaches with this terminology. You might say that discovery is ‘you do, we do’, whereas ‘I do, you do’ is the lecture model and the Socratic method, that I was trained to use in my first school, is perhaps ‘we do, you do’.

Jo had been working with an inexperienced teacher who was struggling with a ‘we do, you do’ approach. Her suggestion was that the teacher should first show the pupils – employ the ‘I do’ mode, before moving on to involving pupils in a problem. Unsurprisingly, I disagree.

I’ve tried out ‘Silent Teacher’, traditional lecture and had a fairly substantial craze on discovery after my GTP, but I always come back to the Socratic method. Why do I like ‘we do’ so much?

Firstly, it ensures that you build up the mathematics in small steps that the pupils understand. In other words, it helps you to avoid the curse of knowledge. In the ‘I do’ mode, you may be making logical leaps that are too large but you won’t find out until it is too late.

Secondly, it emphasises to the pupils that maths is an interrelated web of ideas which can be developed from each other, and encourages the teacher to carefully consider how they will introduce a topic in a way which the pupils can make the steps.

Finally, it forces you to check that all pupils are listening to and understanding what you are saying. If pupils know that they may be called upon at any moment, then they have to be listening. Of course, it’s not perfect: they may not be listening, but at least you’ll find out and correct that.

That said, I empathise with new teachers’ struggle. It takes time and experience to deploy this approach effectively and at Highgate we spent a lot of time training people to do so. Some key strategies:

• Hands-down questioning with no opt-out: My mentor used to say “You have to have an idea. It can be a terrible idea, but you have to have one.” This way you find out what the pupils are thinking, and any misconceptions they may have.
• Back a step: If a pupil gives an incorrect answer, ask them an easier question to help build up to the original question. This requires good understanding of the prerequisite knowledge on the part of the teacher, and is easier if you have a clear Scheme of Work.
• Bounce-back: Another option is to pass the question, or a simpler one, on to another pupil, then come back to the original intended target.
• Differentiation: I’m not a huge fan of this, but I do sometimes differentiate my questioning; I’m looking for a balance between not asking too much patience of the high-attainers, whilst making sure the lower-attainers understand.

You can see (or at least hear) me employing ‘we do’ as the initial approach to instruction in this video:

Overall, I feel that ‘we do’ strikes a good balance between discovery and direct instruction: The teacher uses their expertise to guide the learning, but still gives the pupils a stake in making decisions and the experience of creating new mathematics.

Indeed, when I was speaking to my old HoD about this last week, he told me about the most consistent positive feedback his pupils give in surveys: Compared to their previous schools, they enjoy taking part of the development of new techniques, rather than just being shown how to apply them. (ps. they also get probably the best A-level results in the UK)

What do you think? I would love any feedback on the specific lesson or the idea in general.

No, not these gems: http://www.resourceaholic.com/p/maths-gem.html

These ones: https://www.gemsworldacademy-switzerland.com/

One of the great advantages of Twitter is that it allows me to communicate with a lot of UK maths teachers, despite the fact that I work 1000km away in Switzerland. So I was particularly excited when I found out that one of the teachers I am in touch with happens to work just 30 minutes along the lake (the Suisse-Romande version of “down the road”) from me. Last week, I paid a visit to Dan Pearcy and his department at GEMS, so I thought I’d write about what I learned there.

The first thing that really stood out was how different the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (MYP) is from GCSEs. The pupils frequently produce pieces of work (I guess we would call them controlled assessments), which count towards their final grade and are assessed against different objectives. The first one – knowing and understanding – seems familiar to GCSE teachers. The other three – investigating patterns, communicating and applying mathematics in real-life contexts – are all clearly important parts of mathematics education, but it seems that they are taken much more seriously in the MYP.

Teachers are expected to understand a wide range of types of pupil inquiry and, for example, teach pupils to create their own problems and write clear conclusions. If you’re a teacher who particularly values these parts of mathematics (perhaps you’re sad about the demise of GCSE coursework), then I suspect that you would really enjoy teaching the MYP. The catch? You still have to teach the same curriculum content as GCSE, so it’s tough to fit everything in. I have seen nowhere near enough to conclude definitively but it seemed to me that, at times, understanding of mathematical ideas was sacrificed in order to allow sufficient time to learn how to apply them. I know several teachers who think that this is a good thing: one ex-colleague used to advocate heavily for this approach.

Moving on to some positive points that I picked up from the lessons I observed. Some simple, but when you’re the only maths teacher in a school, it’s really useful to have a reminder:

• In two lessons I observed, I was reminded of the general principle of ‘pictorial before abstract’. The lessons were on gradients and lengths of line segments, to year 7 and 9 respectively. In both, the initial questions had lines clearly drawn on grids, which enabled pupils to apply the key ideas, without the cognitive load of dealing with coordinates.
• Every lesson I saw ended with a ‘plenary’: even if brief, the summary of what pupils had learned tied things together nicely.
• Common sense checking of answers was encouraged. “Does it look about right?”
• All of the teachers gave regular time warnings before a change of activity – a classic strategy, but good to see it being used well.
• With a small class, giving pupils the opportunity to have a go at an example themselves just before / simultaneous to a teacher demonstration – gives the higher-achieving pupils chance to try their ideas, whilst supporting pupils who can’t see what to do.

Finally, it was really interesting and useful to talk to Dan about leading a department and growing a school from scratch. We discussed homework marking policies and how parents can be unhappy about inconsistency between teachers. One thing that particularly struck me was that it seemed, based on a short visit, that keeping the teachers in his department happy was Dan’s first priority. This may be common, but was not the case with my first two HoD’s, who prioritised consistent pedagogical approach and exam results respectively, so it was good to see it.

John Von Neumann’s quote often rings true, but I’m not sure that’s not a good thing.

I saw this quote on twitter a few months ago. I can’t remember where I read it first, but it may well have been courtesy of Dylan Wiliam.

It immediately resounded with me. I feel that I learned a lot of maths this way. And I got a first from Cambridge, surely it must be fine?

On the contrary, whilst I was lucky enough to muddle through regardless, I think that this approach is not effective for the majority of learners.

Greg Ashman makes a good case for not focussing too much only on axioms, but I don’t think (m)any teachers are doing this. In my experience of teaching and observing, the opposite is much more common and I think this is mostly caused by the ‘curse of knowledge’.

I’m new to teaching mixed-ability classes and I’m experiencing this a lot personally, particularly in the lower years. I recently taught an introduction to algebra to year 7. Even after several similar examples, some of the pupils were struggling to simplify d+d+d+d as 4d. They were either not sure what it should be at all, or would write it as d^4.

In my previous selective schools, this was assumed knowledge from primary school so I never even thought about it. In retrospect, I suspect that some pupils didn’t understand it but just got used to it.

When I encountered this misunderstanding, I was at first tempted to say something like “d+d+d+d… it’s just 4 d’s” Unfortunately, this falls down when you get to d×d×d×d, but I also think it falls into the Neumann trap of just asking learners to get used to things. Instead, I should have checked that my pupils understood that 7+7+7+7=4×7. This understanding is important to avoid other future problems: pupils incorrectly substituting into expressions such as 2d, or not knowing what to do when faced with equations such as 2d=7, both because they’re not aware that 2d means 2×d.

I’ve updated my lesson plan to including a check of that knowledge at the start of the topic. I hope that in future this will help pupils to understand how to simplify d+d+d+d, rather than just get used to the answer.

Of late, I have been having some very productive conversations with Jen Brewin, the author of the last post on my blog. She recently mentioned a nice analogy that I have decided is worth sharing, especially because it goes some way to explaining my scheme of work, and some of Jen’s blog post comments.

We both taught at Highgate School and although we only overlapped by one year, we both experienced the same ethos. In Jen’s words:

…as a teacher in this department, I was being given a great responsibility: to join in the telling of a story. This story was one that all of us were in the process of revealing to our pupils, and it was one that was revealed to them over the course of their five (or seven) years at the school.

Everyone who has taught maths at Highgate (or Westminster, where it arguably began… that’s for another time) knows the story to some extent. The extent is limited because it took many years to learn the story, and not everyone stayed for long enough to pick up the whole tale. This is partly because of the way in which it was passed on: meetings between new and experienced members of the department.

There is a written scheme, but it sadly doesn’t reflect the true brilliance of some of the ideas and leaves a lot to the imagination. So I was talking – complaining – to Jen about how it will take me so long to write up the details in order to fully explain the current spreadsheet list of topics with brief descriptions.  Jen said that she feels similarly, and introduced an analogy which I rather enjoyed: a long time ago there were oral tales of a great story, but they weren’t written down until years later by the disciples. As a devout Atheist, I’m not sure why this appeals to me: perhaps because it rather aggrandises the impact of my life’s work! Anyway, as I am aptly named Luke, here is a sneak preview of a small part of my gospel:

This particular section of the scheme of work exemplifies really well another point from Jen’s blog:

The discovery that a highly selective private school would pay so much close attention to the sequencing of teaching was something of a surprise to me.

You may have been surprised that calculators were not introduced in either of the first two occasions on which we teach trigonometry. Perhaps you found it unusual to only introduce tangent first time around; what about sine and cos?

Why these unusual features? This scheme carefully takes into account the limits of children’s working memory and doesn’t try to introduce too many new ideas at once. The gaps between these topics allow time for consolidation and retrieval practice of each new element, before the next one is introduced.

Jen and I discussed how the really funny thing is that it is Highgate and Westminster that are breaking down the content into these small chunks. These are two of the most academically selective, high-achieving schools in the country. If anywhere could get away with introducing many new ideas at once, these schools could. And yet they do not.

Secondly, there is also probably a lot more detail than you’re accustomed to in schemes: for example, the unusual approach of writing the trigonometric functions as scale factors rather than ratios. This fits in beautifully with other parts of the scheme of work: percentages, proportion, similar triangles to form a thread which link different parts of the story together.

When teachers first join the department they often find the specificity of such approaches disconcerting, especially when they are quite different from what they may have done before. But with time, they usually come to realise the beauty of the links, and appreciate the luxury of teaching pupils who have been introduced to mathematics in a familiar manner. If they still don’t like it, they can argue that the department should change: indeed, many department meetings were dedicated to discussing threads from the scheme of work. There are definitely similarities between this approach and that of the departments of Danni Quinn and Greg Ashman.

So, I’ll be writing down the rest of my gospel over the next year or so, as I build my own department around it in Geneva, whilst Jen gradually introduces her version of its ideas to her school in York and there are others out there who know it too. But one big question remains: If Jen and I are some of the disciples, who is Jesus?

This is a guest post by a friend and former colleague, Jen Brewin, who is currently Head of Mathematics at a comprehensive school in York. I whole-heartedly agree with it.

On 16^th October, Mark McCourt posted the following tweets.

Various educators joined in his lament.

Based on the numerous responses to Mark’s question there seems to be a general sense of frustration about this in our profession. Why do people keep asking us to redo this? There’s barely enough time to plan and teach and mark, so why does any school bother wasting time just shuffling things around? After all, surely whether you teach plans and elevations in year 8 or year 9 doesn’t really make a difference does it? And aren’t all schemes basically the same anyway: a glorified re-ordering of the GCSE specification with perhaps a few “must, could, should” thrown in here and there?

Five years ago I think I might have agreed with these frustrations. My experiences in departments up to that point had been that schemes of learning served little purpose other than to make sure all the prescribed content was covered by the time the exams hit. Within that, teachers were largely left responsible for their own medium-term planning, and since my students generally didn’t seem to have any coherent sense what they had learned in the preceding years anyway, what the SoW said they had covered wasn’t really all that helpful in any case.

And in the end it didn’t really matter: year 11 was characterised by a mad dash back through all of the material. Gaps needed to be addressed here, there and everywhere, and since different pupils remembered different things and with only finite lesson time left, it often came down to whether or not they were able to make good use of their revision guides. In hindsight, I had perhaps dismissed the importance of a scheme of work because, really, I’d never actually experienced a real one.

Then in 2012 I joined a department that showed me just what a scheme of work really can be. The discovery that a highly selective private school would pay so much close attention to the sequencing of teaching was something of a surprise to me. I had naively assumed that in an independent school, teachers (some extremely well-qualified mathematicians) would be left to their own devices much more than in the state school setting I was used to. And given the aptitude of its intake, I’d imagined that there would be much less concern about pupils missing out on bits of content here and there – after all they would probably figure it out for themselves.

What I realised very quickly however was quite the opposite: that as a teacher in this department, I was being given a great responsibility: to join in the telling of a story. This story was one that all of us were in the process of revealing to our pupils, and it was one that was revealed to them over the course of their five (or seven) years at the school.

It was a complex novel, with multiple, overlapping themes and carefully constructed characters. The introduction of each strand of the story had been pondered over, and the groundwork for each new concept had been established carefully in earlier chapters, well in advance of its exposition. For every student to be able to follow this story it was essential that each teacher knew exactly what part of the story they were responsible for passing on. The narrative was communicated in great detail, and students knew it.

This story was not static but as a department we rewrote it, collaboratively, over the years. We enjoyed debates about whether this idea would really fit better here, and whether this theme might be better understood with this other introduction. It was a joy and a privilege to play a small role in the telling and the rewriting of a great story.

This might sound all very flowery, and I suppose it is, but I cannot think of a better analogy for a scheme of learning. Unfortunately, the “story” that is so often passed on to pupils is far from coherent. Learners hear the same sections over and over again, yet they are expected to recall something vaguely mentioned many years earlier in order to make sense of a new theme. Some parts are told without the necessary back-story for them to make sense of it, and certain vital sections might just have been missed out entirely. It’s hard to blame someone for not following the story if the storyteller is essentially a rambling old uncle.

So when I say I have fallen in love with curriculum design, what I am talking about is the careful construction of a coherent narrative: one which respects the limitations of learners’ working memories; one which accounts for the inevitability of forgetting; one which establishes high expectations of the learner’s ability to think logically and make connections for themselves without leaving to chance whether they have all the necessary skills and background knowledge to do so.

When teachers say “stop re-inventing the wheel” I want to point at this:

This is apparently what we got the first time we invented a wheel, around 3500BC. It’s a damn good thing it was “re-invented”, and that it continues to be re-invented because there are always better wheels to be made and different things which need wheels. You can’t put that block of stone on a Ferrari or a skateboard or a chair. Luckily there are people who like re-inventing wheels, they are really good at it, and as technology develops they are doing it all the time and in all sorts of contexts.

Cognitive research has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. Educators and psychologists alike have a much better understanding of what we can do to help our students to remember and understand what we want them to learn. If this knowledge isn’t embedded in the structure of our schemes of work – if it doesn’t define (or even inform) the narrative we tell them – then our schemes of work are not fit for purpose.

Ask yourselves these questions about your scheme:

• Does it cover the entire time the learner is going to be at the school? (I see no value in a division between key stages, for example)
• Does it ensure the teachers know exactly what content learners should meet at what stage?
• Does it ensure a consistent approach to vocabulary, models and representations so that pupils have a coherent experience when moving between teachers?
• Is the sequencing of content logical (mathematically, pedagogically sound)?
• Are ideas revisited and developed at intervals that minimise the need to re-teach?
• Is enough time devoted to establishing the most fundamental skills and models which underpin successful teaching of the content?
• Are review, revision and assessment built into the scheme at intervals that encourage and enable learners to develop fluency and embed knowledge and skills in their long-term memory?
• Does the scheme demonstrate an expectation that pupils will have learned what they have previously been taught?

The point Mark made of course (that it is a time-consuming and therefore expensive exercise) remains valid. It takes great mathematical expertise and many years of iteration to go from nothing to a successful scheme of learning which really does satisfy the criteria above. But now that I am running a department, I consider this to be one of the single most important things I can establish in my role, and I am excited and daunted by the challenge. However, I know it can be done because I have seen it, and I’m not starting from scratch.

Most fundamentally I disagree with the claim that we should stop talking about what we teach and instead talk about how we teach. What we teach and how we teach cannot be separated. The starting point for successful teaching has to be the understanding of where students are now and where we are trying to get to. It’s imperative not only that schools have the best scheme of work they can, but that teachers engage with it critically. A colleague of mine at the independent school said “I get so frustrated by how schemes just degrade over time”. I think she’s right, they do, but I know there are teachers like me who find the challenge of reimagining, tweaking and improving a scheme one of the most interesting and satisfying aspects of teaching.

If you have read my posts about leaving Highgate, or my own scheme of work, you will understand why I feel the same was as Jen. She has summarised my thoughts much more clearly than I ever could.

I’m creating a reading list to share with staff at my school. I plan to give them some time to read some of these at the start of my assessment INSET next week.

Formative Assessment:

Avoid complex tasks for formative assessment:
What makes good formative assessment by Daisy Christodoulou

Making the feedback more work for the pupils than the teacher:
Five Ways to give Feedback as Actions by Tom Sherrington

A tip for using mini-whiteboards:
Slow motion learning by Greg Ashman

Why it’s dangerous to use summative assessments formatively:
Assessment practice that is wide of the mark by Matthew Benyohai

Use feedback to change behaviour:
Moving from Marking to Feedback by Harry Fletcher-Wood

Formative assessment can be generic and subject specific:
AfL in Science, A Symposium by Adam Boxer

A classic, in case you haven’t read it. Giving pupils grades is not generally a good idea:
Inside the Black Box by Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black

Summative Assessment:

Data collection shouldn’t be the main focus of assessment:
Breaking useless assessment habits by Stephen Tierney

Long tests are better than short tests, but even then we should only take note of significant differences. Teacher accountability is bad.
What if we can’t measure progress? by Becky Allan

Why teacher assessment isn’t as good as it may seem:
Tests are Inhuman, and that’s what is so good about them by Daisy Christodoulou

A way to report pupils performance which gives better information to parents, tutors and the pupils themselves:
Pragmatic Assessment by Matthew Benyohai

 

I’d be interested to know if you’ve read any blogs which summarise Inside the Black Box nicely, as it’s a bit long for staff to read during an INSET session. I’d also be grateful if you could share a blog on the difference between summative and formative assessment, in case there are any members of staff who are unsure about this.

Apart from those two specific questions… these are just five blogs that have stuck in my memory over the past year. I’m sure there are many others that I have read and forgotten about, or completely missed in the first place. What would you add to this list?

This idea is totally stolen from a former colleague of mine, Andrew Dales.

His question: what happens after an intervention? Specifically, he framed the question perfectly as the following graph:

So, assuming that the intervention produces a greater increase in attainment than control (which I’ve exaggerated significantly for the purposes of clarity), what happens afterwards?

Does the intervention instil in pupils some newfound ability to continue progressing at a greater rate than they would have before (route A)?

Do the pupils return to the same rate of progress as before the intervention, staying ahead of where they were before (route B)?

Or do they, post-intervention, progress at a lower rate for some time, returning to their original path (route C)?

Of course, this will depend on the intervention. As teachers, I feel that we should consider which approaches will help our pupils to follow route A (or at least B!), not just those which produce the largest improvement over the time span of the intervention.

In the same way as Daniel Kahneman introduces new terminology in Thinking, Fast and Slow, I think it could be valuable to introduce the new terminology into educational research: “Is this a Route A intervention, or will the students revert to control via Route C?”

I wonder how much research tries to answer this question? My suspicion is not a lot.