Effective Papers For learning

Arguably, one of the most valuable skills that teachers and schools can develop is that of learning  not to experiment with new ideas. This might sound unexciting, but as Dylan Wiliam persuasively suggests here, this is not necessarily so. To summarise, he argues that it's more beneficial to work on the areas where there's evidence it makes the most difference to learning (formative assessment essentially) than to flit about, picking up the latest fad, giving it a go and then moving on to something else a few months later. I love this. I'm not trying to suggest that I am against innovation, creativity or experimentation in the classroom, only that when I do experiment, it's likely to be with an aspect of teaching which makes a difference - feedback being one good example. This way of thinking has become somewhat ingrained in me, to the extent that, in order for me to assimilate a new approach to the point of actually using it with students, it has to have survived a tax...

Well, after the rather lengthy philosophising of my first post, here's a quick overview of an approach which has been working well for me recently. Inspired by reading  Teaching As Leadership  (many thanks to my HOD for gifting it to me) I took these steps: Talk to the students about 'Big Goals' – setting quantifiable, measurable and ambitious achievement goals with them. In our case, it was to achieve ten marks of progress between their Eng Lang mock and the real exam Talk to them about what would be needed to achieve these goals – basically, good lessons from me, and real effort from them Give them an exit ticket at the end of every lesson, on which they had to note what they'd learnt, then give a mark out of 10 for the quality of the lesson, and the same for the degree of effort they thought they'd put in Begin each lesson with a report of the previous lesson's scores, and a quick reflection on whether it was good enough to keep us on track or not (...