Effective Papers For learning

After a period of being AWOL from the #soloarmy, I returned to duty this week, introducing my classes to SOLO taxonomy for the first time this year. As detailed on a previous post, I dabbled with using SOLO to teach planning of ideas for writing in July, and felt things went pretty well; the writing the kids produced was impressive, I gained fluency in my understanding and explanation of the approach and I left the school year feeling satisfied that SOLO was a useful addition to my teaching. I also enjoyed the experience of learning from others via twitter / blogs; this was new to me, and I loved the fact that I was suddenly connected with so many colleagues who were actively helping me to improve. One thing that twitter will not provide, however, is cosy consensus. I was interested to witness in the summer what might be termed a 'solo-backlash', if that's not too impressive a term for what is essentially a few blokes fiddling around on their smartphones (and it seems to m...

An education-myth that has been thoroughly debunked over recent years is the view that IT is inherently engaging to young people. Many would argue that this has never been the case; I disagree, remembering the way that my pupils sat up with genuine interest when my first data projector was installed in 2001, and the tangible increase in concentration and attention engendered as I nonchalantly swept through some poorly-phrased lesson aims on my fledgling powerpoint. 'Well would you look at that,', they may have thought, 'Sir's board has got a scarf thing running down one side, and the letters are flying in from all directions! Look – there's another one!'. Exciting times indeed, although I recall with regret that approximately twelve minutes later, the novelty had worn off and we were back to normal, which is to say me hyper-actively prancing around at the front, trying to persuade groups of reluctant students to apply themselves to writing PEE paragraphs. Whilst...

One interesting change in my teaching recently has been, rather than a technical change in my practice, a change in the fundamental beliefs and attitudes I hold about learning, talent and achievement. I am inclined to the view that teaching is, largely, a learned skill, and feel that I've benefitted a great deal from experimenting with new techniques and strategies in the classroom. I'm not sure that any of them, however, has made a more positive difference than the change in the way I understand talent. My change in mindset has come about through reading a number of recent books which look closely at the nature of ability and high-performance. These include Outliers and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Carol Dweck's work on Mindset, The Genius in All of Us by David Schenk and, especially, Bounce by Matthew Syed. The central conclusions that these texts share is that society places far too much emphasis on the idea of achievement being led by natural, innate, genetically-guid...

This recent TES article   Think you've implemented Assessment for Learning? has prompted some reflection in me on my own journey with AFL. Wiliam suggests that there is much work to be done before AFL can be said to have had a substantially postive impact in our schools. I think he's right, and my own experiences and learning may help to illustrate some of the issues. I trained in 1999 – just after the publishing of Inside the Black Box ; the language and ideas of AFL have therefore been a feature of practice and professional learning throughout my entire career. It might be hoped that I was in a great position to benefit from AFL, that I would have ridden the wave of enthusiasm and development at an exciting time to be a teacher. The truth is less positive. For longer than I care to admit, whilst I was using some of the elements I thought I needed to, such as having lesson aims on the board, using mark schemes, doing some odd bits of (largely unsuccessful) peer and self-assess...

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 (...