Effective Papers For learning

Getting as much value as possible from mock exam feedback is crucial. Clearly, the specific style and approach will vary by subject, and there is no overall ‘best way’.  However, the below points are relevant across subjects. 1)       Think Diagnosis, Therapy, Testing -    Form Diagnoses to articulate the learning gaps in student work -    Plan Therapy – sustained attention to these gaps in and out of lessons between now and the summer -   Plan Testing –when and how will you retest students to establish if the therapy has worked 2)       Avoid overwhelming students with too much feedback in one go -     Providing students with a long list of weaknesses or areas to improve in one go risks swamping working memory, so that students. -    A ‘feedback lesson’ which covers multiple concepts in explaining what students have done well / wrong may be useful – however we do need to be mindful of wo...

Identifying where learning comes from is an inexact science, and despite the over-confident title of this post, we can’t say with full certainty what works. We especially can’t dictate what will work in other schools with contexts, challenges and opportunities that are unknown to us and different to our own. However, and with that caveat in mind, this post considers aspects of teaching at our school which seem to make the most difference in promoting achievement. English Literature GCSE results in particular make for an interesting case study. Our school is placed in the first percentile for progress according to FFT, and disadvantaged students make more progress than the average for the cohort. Last year, 120 /225 students outperformed FFT5 estimates. Something's going very right here - but what? Last week, we tried conducting a post-mortem on a successful former Year 11 GCSE student’s book, by photographing every page and analysing it to identify its key features. What did the te...

One of the happy outcomes of the removal of NC levels has been the need for schools to look again at assessment at KS3, and refresh thinking in this fundamentally important area. There is much to be gained, with improved materials, approaches and systems carrying the potential to positively influence teacher workload, clarity of course design, efficiency and impact of feedback etc. Problem is, it's hard to write reliable, valid tests that provide us with the sort of precise information on what students can / can't understand that we need. I've been working with our English department to try to write mid-term tests for a Year 8 unit on Of Mice and Men. This has led to some great discussion as we try to find greater clarity in terms of what exactly we want to teach and assess. We've come up with the below draft so far, but I'd really be interested in any views on how this is shaping up - in particular: - are these questions clear and valid (by which I mean are we test...

As we approach the end of another academic year, we are thinking again about ways to strengthen our culture and practice for professional learning at school. With this in mind, I’d be grateful for any views on the below, or to hear from any other schools who already do this or something similar. We’ve worked hard to make lesson observation a positive experience over the last few years. Taking grading away felt risky at the time, but turned out to be an absolute nailed-on no-brainer. Thinking carefully about how to run lesson feedback , with a view to rooting the conversation in clarity and humility has helped us to make the process more collaborative and impactful.  Explicitly dissociating lesson observation from appraisal or quality assurance has encouraged a healthier focus on development, and reduced stress. This year, we’ve experimented by retaining the same observer for each of the three observations we have over the year. We’ve organised observations in three loose cycles (o...

A few weeks ago, I posted an initial plan for an upcoming inset day . Thanks to the thinking prompted by writing the plan in the first place and the subsequent feedback and comments received through twitter, we've pretty much ditched it and gone to plan B. Here, I'll outline the changes we've made and the reasons behind them. Plan A: The original plan was for a morning carousel of training activities, followed by an afternoon of collaborative planning in faculties, ideally involving application of some of the ideas and training from earlier in the day. There's a logic here and I think we would have done it well; the proposed topics were interesting and relevant, we have great people who would have worked hard to deliver them and I think our teachers would have, on the whole, had an enjoyable experience. There are significant limitations to this way of organising the time. The primary risk, I think, is the danger that the moment that term starts for real, the interest, i...

I've written before about attitudes to risk in teaching , arguing that whilst  'risk-taking' in the classroom is often interpreted as a very positive trait, associated with inspiration, creativity, and excitement, we may well be better served by rejecting this view in favour of more careful approaches. We recently ran a staff meeting on the topic of managing the risks of giving feedback to low attaining students - I'll briefly outline the approach and share the resources below. Staff meeting feedback to vulnerable learners from Cherwelllearning Firstly came clarification what exactly we meant by 'vulnerable learners' in our context (essentially, individuals working at low levels of attainment and not currently making strong enough progress). We then overviewed our key messages about features of teaching that we think work best in the context of our school.  Having visited a fair range of other schools to investigate this issue, the question 'how do you...

There’s much I enjoy about my work: the banter with students and colleagues, the fact that you get paid actual money for spending time reading and talking about poetry, those lessons where you are teaching material so palpably interesting and worth-knowing that you really can’t think of many places you’d rather be.  There are other, less predictable dispensers of joy also - when students say funny stuff in essays (recent favourites: 1-  “...in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Fruitility’...”, 2 - “...Romeo and Juliet’s ‘star-cross-eyed lovers’...”, 3 - the ‘shepherd’s pipe’, as symbolically employed by a soldier in Stevie Smith’s wonderfully bleak dystopian poem ‘Come on, Come Back’ replaced with a reference to his being in possession of a “shepherd’s pie”); the fact that, after an intense working week, Saturdays function as an oasis of ‘getting life back’: of messing around with the kids, of leisurely cups of tea, of the same weekly debate with my wife over whether access to watching Ma...