Canons Careers - Our First Dedicated Careers Newsletter

 

"Are we there yet?": Pedagogy Leaders & The Art of Backseat Driving

I have a number of words for it:  Organic is my favourite, but I also like Bottom-Up, and Classroom-Led is always a winner too.  Recently I have begin to conceptualise it in terms of Guerrilla Teachers and Trojan Mice, but for the purposes of this post I shall call it Backseat Driving.

What I am referring to with all of these terms is an approach to the development of teaching and learning at Canons High School that doesnt come top-down from one or more members of SLT with an 'AMAZING IDEA!!!' but instead emerges from the experiences and insights of those true classroom-heroes who teach around 4 out of 5 periods every day.

This backseat driving vision was spearheaded from 2010 onwards by our Outstanding Pedagogy Project (OPP), a group that identifies an area of pedagogic focus that they wish to explore in order to pave the way for an eventual whole-school approach.  OPP is a self-nominated group of teachers whose aim and membership changes annually based upon what the focus for innovation is.  So far they have looked at 'Pedagogy as an art, craft and science', the 'Accelerated Learning Cycle' and 'The use of tablet devices to improve collaborative learning'.

All was going well with this organic approach to T&L but then in April 2012, as part of an action plan about building the schools' capacity to fully engage with the Teaching School movement, we decided to light the rocket boosters under the process and created the posts of Pedagogy Leaders.  Designed to mimic the structures of Teaching School Alliances and Challenge Partnership Hubs we wanted Pedagogy Leaders to function as pivotal figures within the school leadership structure, providing expertise in teaching, to fashion a coherent whole school approach and to demonstrate skills in coaching to support colleagues in implementing this whole school approach: the Canons Pedagogy.

We advertised the five fixed-term, outcomes-oriented, project-management Pedagogy Leader posts in time to appoint and deploy them from Easter 2012, and were astonished with the level of interest that they generated.  Rewarded with a significant allowance but no weekly time (we choose to cover more utilitarian blocks of time as necessary instead), eighteen of our colleagues elected to apply for the post.  There were only two qualifying criteria: that they had been outstanding in a recent observation (or teach an outstanding lesson on demand for the post) and that they submit a letter of application explaining an area of focus for teaching and learning that they wanted to implement.  The selection process was simply an analysis and evaluation of whose personal visions for pedagogy at the school were most compelling and how these visions might be able to interlock or dovetail most effectively for the benefit of the school.  It was the hardest selection process I have been a part of, and yet the most rewarding.

And then they were in post: six of them (why stick at five when you can have six?). Comprised of two NQTs, an AST, a Key Stage leader and two Heads of Department their first term's task was to build on the work of the OPP group, bringing together a coherent and compelling pedagogical model for the school, and introduce it to the staff. After an introductory day offsite to really think through their work - a day in which they ejected SLT members from the room whilst they chose to ignore the task we had asked of them - they wove together the Accelerated Learning Cycle, their own priority themes and some specific teaching strategies to form the core of our Canons Pedagogy. Then they constructed and delivered their own INSET day to introduce staff to their pedagogical model, showing the whats, the hows and the whys in a way that was indeed compelling if the startlingly positive freeform evaluations were anything to go by. 

Their second term in role saw them outshine the irrepressible Alistair Smith whilst running a second INSET day that deepened staff understanding of the Canons Pedagogy through the use of cross-curricular planning time saw some of the Ped Leaders (by now the shortened form of their titles had stuck) robustly challenged by their peers, as school leaders should be. They rose to that challenge as they have risen to all challenges and persuaded or adapted as appropriate. Nobody bailed them out, partly because nobody needed to but mainly because distributive leadership requires the distribution of both professional autonomy and professional accountability: they needed to face the flak for any unpopular actions or ideas. 

In this second term in role the Ped Leaders also took on the responsibility of leading our Teacher Learning Communities.  These TLCs are small-scale action-research peer-to-peer groups which we aligned with the six areas of focus identified by the Ped Leaders in their application letters. Amongst these are groups looking at 'Language for Learning', 'Interdependent Learning' and 'Questioning for Learning' and it is in these groups that the Ped Leaders have been able to practice and develop (in themselves and others) the coaching skills that underpinned the third  of our pedagogy focused INSET days. 

After the Christmas break the Ped Leaders created their third INSET day, but showed great awareness of the needs of their colleagues in devising a programme (on the theme of in-class evaluation of learning) that was all about staff choosing what they wanted to do, rather than being subjected to a one-size-fits-all day. In order to make this possible they had to do what I and my Assistant Head colleague had had to do with them; LET GO. For the first time they (by now the front seat drivers) had to invite their back seat passengers to become drivers. That INSET day saw over twenty colleagues deliver sessions to their peers and the introduction of our first mini-Teachmeets. I suspect pedagogy-focused INSET days at Canons will never be the same again. 

That Spring term also saw the Peds (as they had by now become known) put together our first Student Pedagogy Day, something like an INSET day for students in years seven to ten. This involved them creating a rich and varied programme, to be taught by all of our staff, that introduced our students to the same pedagogical structures, themes and techniques as our staff had been introduced to on their INSET days. The day was a great success but not without it's challenges. It is to the credit of the Ped Leaders that they were brutally honest in their own analysis of the day and incisive in their evaluation of what will need to be retained and what will need to be changed in any future student learning days. 

All of which brings us careering to the current term and the work of the Peds that is happening now. Because we had front-loaded our INSET provision this term is about the consolidation of the work that has been done across the year. This involves our no-longer-backseat-drivers drawing together the work of their TLCs, engaging with new processes for peer-coaching and sharing of best practice, evaluating the impact of their work this year, responding to an ever-increasing amount of requests from colleagues who have seen how good they are, and beginning to show to the outside world what they have done this year through blogs on this site. 

Later this term, on June 21st, they will be presenting their journey (and our school's journey with them at the steering wheel of teaching and learning) at the prestigious Keynote Zone of the SSAT's Achievement Show at Twickenham. In the continued spirit of fully distributed responsibility they have complete autonomy over what and how they present on that day. We hope to see many of you there. 

But what does the future hold for our Pedagogy Leaders?  Their term of office is coming to an end but they have done such a fantastic job for Canons Hogh School that the role is now seen as invaluable for us. We have just advertised for a second generation of Peds with a new brief that will build upon the work of the first generation by extending it and deepening it. The current postholders will all be more than welcome to apply and I've no doubt some of them will do so. Four of the six current postholders have achieved substantive promotions in the meantime and may choose not to do so, but if that is the case it will be regarded as a success of the strategy not a failure. 

There will, however, be others that apply to become our new Pedagogy Leaders and it will be good to see who they are, what animates them and how they want to strike out in new and unexpected directions and how these are reconciled with the work that has been done so far. The one thing that will remain certain is that once the new team are formed they will continue to have significant freedom to drive teaching and learning forward from the front seat rather than be seen as passengers to be carried along. It is a model of staff development, deployment and influence that I can't recommend highly enough to any and every school leader with the will to make it happen. 

Using a 'Taxonomy of Errors' to Enhance Student Responses

I am writing this post to outline and to describe a technique I learnt some years ago from a long-forgotten colleague that has had a very positive impact on my teaching and the learning of my students:  the Taxonomy of Errors.  As well as describing the technique I want to show how I have developed it in recent weeks, how I have used it proactively with my students and what impact it has had on their written work.  Hopefully it may be useful to one or two of you.

In essence, the Taxonomy of Errors is a response to that perennial problem faced by teachers of dealing with a class that are all making the same mistakes.  It is a method for trying to ensure that students learn from each others' mistakes as well as from their own.  It is a method for trying to ensure that when they next attempt the same task, they will improve markedly rather than incrementally because they have addressed a range of foibles in their work.

In practice, the Taxonomy of Errors is little more than a summary of all the feedback that you have given to the students as individuals with a focus on the comments you have written time after time after time.  Sometimes I have even been known to rank them in order of frequency!!!

This is an example of a Taxonomy of Errors (ToE) for my top set English class.  I took them over two weeks ago and immediately got them to complete a full practice exam for me so I could see what they could do in the heat of battle.  This is the ToE for the important question on the Writing Section, which requires them to analyse language across two non-fiction texts and make comparisons.  As you can probably guess this response was not perhaps their finest hour, mainly because they had forgotten exam techniques in ensuring that they performed well in their controlled assessments.  This strategy is part of my portfolio of tools for getting them prepared for their exams later this month.  You will notice that the vocabulary is negative.  Although I sometimes write ToEs positively (there is an example later) the intention is to be bluntly honest about what went wrong, and the fact that the list is based on the whole class makes it easier to be so (although I am bluntly honest individually too!).

Here is another example of a Taxonomy of Errors, this time in response to a collection of timed essays from my AS Sociology students.  In this ToE I made an attempt to separate out the basic errors (at the top) and the more complex error (at the bottom) to ensure that they understood the things that they really ought not have done, regardless of their ability, and the genuine areas for further learning.  I always find that at this time of the academic year students facing imminent external examination make all kinds of foolish errors and they need to be scuttled in order to allow them to get at the more important stuff that will genuinely allow them to achieve higher grades (we always call them the Sheep Grades because they are B, A, A* - Geddit?). I always present this feedback at the very start of the lesson after I have marked the work and am increasingly linking the feedback directly to the activities of the next lesson so that they improve upon their work immediately.

Here's my latest feedback to my Y11 English students, and in it I have focused even more on the creation of a genuine Taxonomy of Errors (that may have been how it was intended and I have just found my way to it the long way around!!): from the basics that are genuinely beneath this groups of students, to the intermediate and advanced.  This feedback was from an essay on An Inspector Calls where the students were (to a greater or lesser extent) all guilty of simply trying to rewrite their controlled assessment work on Arthur and Sheila rather than respond about the Inspector as they had been asked.  I was therefore able to show them how the error at the intermediate level was preventing them from accessing the higher grades, and thereby making the feedback on higher level errors virtually redundant (most students achieved only between 17 and 21 marks out of 30 because of their intermediate errors).

Here is a very typical response from one of the students that led to this Taxonomy of Errors, and was even one of the better ones because he made sure to refer to the Inspector on four occasions.  In the end, though, his best observations were reserved for the character of Sheila and he would be reliant upon the leniency of the examiner at best and, at worst, reliant upon another question coming up that allowed him to crowbar in his understanding of the character of Sheila.  In response to the ToE then, I devised a sequence of activities that was focused on using 15 minutes of their 45 to plan effectively to answer the actual question, not the one that they wish had been set.  This involved brainstorming what they knew already about the Inspector, selecting apposite quotes (ensuring that at least one of these was from the stage directions to allow the response to include reference to stagecraft - from the Advanced section of the ToE), exploring the language of the quotes for dominant and subversive interpretations and then evaluating the quotes in light of the essay question.

And here is the response that the same student generated during this double lesson in response to the activities I had set; activities which had been informed by the Taxonomy of Errors (at this stage of the year my lessons are almost entirely planned in response to their emergent needs). I'm not claiming that it is a startlingly better response, but it does tackle the intermediate error of not focusing on the question to ensure he has a chance at the top marks.  Further to this it addresses the advanced error of a lack of reference to stagecraft and deepens his use of language analysis from a straightforward discussion of the word 'horrible' to a more convincing analysis of the words 'taking charge masterfully' in a better quotation that, again, had more resonance with the actual question he had been asked to answer.

So there you have it.  In my classroom the Taxonomy of Errors is used for three purposes.  In its most simple guise it tells the students what mistakes have been made, by others as well as themselves, so that they can get a sense of their achievements alongside those of their peers.  At a more sophisticated level the Taxonomy of Errors allows me to rank the impact of different errors on their marks and/or grades by showing them how basic or intermediate errors can undermine work that in other ways might have the potential to achieve highly.  But the Taxonomy of Errors is at its most effective when it informs my planning so that students are taught (or re-taught) the knowledge or skills that had been demonstrated so poorly in their submitted work.  The Taxonomy of Errors is at its most potent when it is used in this way and results in the students being asked to edit or rewrite the error-strewn original in a conscious attempt to improve it.  The Taxonomy of Errors is at its most rewarding when it helps make marking have a genuine impact on learning.



How I came to find myself building a website.. http://canonsmaths.co.uk/

Flipped learning @CanMathsDepartm

In KS4 we've been trying out flipped learning with varied success! As the Monday 11th March blog: 'Improving my written feedback' pointed out, sometimes it's even difficult to get staff to 'do their homework' and watch the video clip.

As one of the guilty ones I've been looking for a way to get my classes onboard with it.
At KS4 we've been using Fronter (a VLE) to upload small video clips on to. Students are set a clip on the relevant topic for their flipped homework. They're expected to watch the clip and try out the practice questions.
Sounds easy right?
The first problem is getting students to remember their login details, find the relevant clip and make sure it plays on their computer. Some teachers (CMm & ASm) have had admirable success with getting their classes over this hurdle, however in my opinion it's still not possible to see what the students can really do on their own outside of lessons because the practice questions shown in the clips are swiftly followed by model answers.
I've been trying to think my way round this problem with CMm and we came up with a couple of solutions that I'll discuss now.
Firstly we could upload the PDFs of practice questions that go along with each clip but crucially don't give the answers away. This definitely solves one of the issues as it actually allows students to show what they can do independently. I've been giving out hard copies of the practice questions for students over the last few weeks alongside taking a register (see pic. below) of who has been given the homework and who's handed it back in. The result: homework handed in has shot up dramatically!

I still have problems with students saying they can't login or the sounds not working on the clip. Fortunately, CMm and I had a timely visit to King Solomon Academy recently to see Bruno Reddy (@MrReddyMaths & www.mrreddy.com) and what he's been doing with his version of flipped learning called 'time shifted learning'.
This is where the building my own website idea comes in.
Bruno's stripped the process down and tailored it to bring out the best in his mixed ability classes. Through creating his own website he said he was able to cut out the login process for students completely. He then created and uploaded clips organised by week and topic. Students watch the clips that use his style, preferred methods and key language. After they've watched the clip they answer the questions below that Bruno's embedded in the page using a simple Google Docs form. When a student hits  'submit form' their results are collated in a Google Spreadsheet and emailed to Bruno along with a time stamp saying when they did the work. This can then be kept as a record  and used to inform planning and identify areas that the teacher needs to go over in class with individuals/groups.
The results so far have been really encouraging. The obvious drawback is the time involved in making material for the website and maintaining it. I've got over the first hurdle already though which was to bite the bullet and actually have a go at building my first ever website (feedback and any technical issues spotted welcome!).
What's next?
This half term I'm going to develop and share the website with my classes and department. I'll let you know how we get on!

http://canonsmaths.co.uk/


Ed Salton

Maths

 

                                         Homework record sheet: 

 

 

Cross Curricular Coaching Triad

After a lesson observation by our Assistant Head teacher I was selected along with another teacher at the school to be a part of a coaching triad working with other schools in the borough to improve our teaching and learning.  In our triads we each observe and give feedback to one another with a particular focus area, decided upon in the first meeting.  The triads are made up of teachers from different schools, different subjects and different age groups in Harrow. 

In our first meeting at Park High school our group decided to focus on slow independent deep learning. This was something that had been thrust in front of me in our most recent inset (@Kevbartle) and I really liked the idea but wasn’t too sure what it would look like in lessons.  In our triad we discussed some areas of focus and went away and researched some more to get a better understanding.

I decided to focus on universal skills in lessons which can be used in all walks of life and put this to a year 7 class a few lessons prior to the first observation. In a badminton lesson we discussed deep learning and the G&T in the class really grabbed onto this idea and came up with some great answers in relation to real world skills.  During the connection phase students talked about the benefit of our activities and an improvement in their hand eye co-ordination to help them with their writing in class. By the end of the lesson students were able to use their own success and failure to talk about much bigger messages such as taking the easy way out, persevering and people’s different approaches to challenge.  Students in the class really liked how we were linking other areas into our PE lesson and asking them to think more about how skills are inter related with everyday life.   It is getting them to think more and they are all enjoying this new angle to their lessons.

I taught the first lesson of three in our triad and taught a lesson on teamwork.  Having just been to a teachmeet, I was full of ideas and enthusiasm for the lesson. I started with a silent brainstorm regarding key words related to teamwork and then got the students to decide upon their own focus in the lesson  They were split into four groups and each group compiled their own list of key words. The groups fed back to the rest of class and then decided on one word in particular that they thought was the most important.  These were: trust, co-operation and communication. Students then graded themselves by my making an ‘A, B or C’ with their hands on each of the key words.  I split the hall in two and had on two identical obstacle courses set up on each side.  Classes would complete the obstacle course with three students blindfolded and three students guiding them round, in their teams they would decide on the best strategy to get their team round. Each group was timed to add an element of competition. The two groups not participating observed the groups and made notes on WWW in relation to the three key words.  These groups fed back and the active groups were able to feedback to me what they thought they needed to improve on based on the peer evaluation.

The groups rotated and were able to adapt the skills they had learnt from observing first time round.  In the consolidation phase students then graded themselves again using their hand signals and we focussed on some of the key skills for each of the key words and some of the improvements that had been made.

The lesson went well and I made a real effort to not rush activities and for students to give effective peer observation so there was slow independent learning.  I wanted students to know exactly what their strengths were and what they needed to do to improve. Unfortunately, we did run out of time to consolidate as well as we could have but in the next lesson I picked up where we left off and students quickly linked back to the last lesson. The feedback from the triad was really good and opened my eyes to other areas to improve on such as cross-curricular links. Both colleagues who observed me talked about how students should be able to use language from Maths and English to communicate better with each other and were surprised that the students themselves hadn’t made the link.  This is now one of the focuses in my lessons and I am constantly challenging students to make links with other subjects in the activities which students are now starting to do quite effectively; improving both their literacy and numeracy in PE.

The following week I observed a Maths teacher. The lesson was very good and the students made clear progress but there were also some structural elements that I thought could be improved on.  During the feedback, the teacher was very receptive to ideas and genuinely wanted constructive feedback on how he could improve. We discussed some of the areas that could be worked on. One of them was the use of two different topics in a lesson instead of focussing on one and breaking it down into smaller chunks.

 In the lesson the teacher discussed ways to be resourceful such as dialogue with the person next to you, sharing ideas and using your book to help solve the task/challenge.  He included this in his lesson objective but there was little assessment of this in the lesson and focussed mainly on how student’s solved the tasks.  I have been guilty of this before and it can be so easy to focus on your main objective in the lesson.

In the final week of the first round of observations I observed a Year 5 lesson it was a very different atmosphere to a secondary school (with much lower ceilings). The students were excited to have us in the classroom but quickly focussed when the teacher started the lesson.  I really enjoyed the lesson, there was a lot more use of touchy feely resources (jam, toothpaste, vegetable fat, pictures of objects) which really engaged the students early on. This is something that I am trying to incorporate more with the use of fascinators (connection activities) in my lessons.  The students worked exceedingly well in groups to find the difference between a solid, liquid and gas.  Their passion for finding the answer was evident as well as their ability to work interdependently: they all got stuck in and were very into the task asking each other challenging questions and investigating solutions themselves.

The pupils were so keen to give their answers and got very excited, as you would expect the noise level went up but only because of their eagerness to let the teacher know what they had found out. This was something that was discussed afterwards and strategies such as using their hands to grade themselves (A,B,C) and having somewhere for students to contribute answers, such as post it notes or writing under key words on A3 paper would give students an outlet for their answers.

As a coaching triad we are now half way through the process and it has been fantastic. I have learnt a lot from the other teachers but it has also given me an opportunity without the stress of a formal observation.  I feel much more driven to improve that area of my lessons (slow, independent, deep learning) and have more confidence in the direction I am heading with my teaching.  Having a clear focus has allowed me to make marginal gains which are so crucial and which  are benefitting the rest of my classes, giving me more motivation to improve my teaching.  I am really looking forward to the next phase and am strongly behind the power of coaching.

Improving my written feedback

My department and I are working in together to try out different strategies to improve the feedback that we give to pupils and the impact that it has on their learning. We want to move away from the traditional 'Tick or cross 20 sums' approach beloved of maths teachers since time began.

I chose the triads based on my knowledge of complimentary strengths of each of my team but each group has come up with their own action plan to research, share and develop individually and as a group and we'll be reporting our findings back to each other before taking best practice forward to create what I hope will be an effective, consistent and sustainable departmental policy.

This blog post will outline one of the things I've been playing with to improve the frequency and quality of my written feedback, which to be honest has always been a bit ropey - I know the right thing to do but don't always make the time to do it, for anybody other than my year 11s. Increasingly so as I've gained more responsibilities, inside and outside of school. I've compensated for it by becoming very good with verbal feedback but the thing that really made me think was when the head observed me for our whole school review and said the quality of written feedback is what stopped her giving my lesson a 1, it was the first time I'd dipped below a grade 1 for an observed lesson for several years. I argued a bit but deep down knew it could be better. Only question? How to improve without throwing my work -life balance entirely out of the window?

Brief notes below... ( it was orig going to be an email to my fellow triad members as we agreed that this is how we'd keep each other posted regarding what we had been trying out).


Once a week. Year 9 class in the double lesson ( 2hrs)

Make sure I speak to every student in the class individually and mark their book/work. Tell them I will be doing this at start of lesson. Not every single question but specific questions that I have targeted as they demonstrate the skills for the lesson or may require deeper understanding.

Talk to the students about the work as I normally would and ask them a supplementary question related to what they have done.

They answer verbally but I also write this question down in their books as we are talking and get them to write their response. Evidence of on going dialogue between me and students.

If the students are clearly stuck or making the same repeated mistake. I write a very clear comment that will help them to improve immediately. I talk to the student re the comment and they have to respond to it verbally and in writing either whole I am there or within 5 min, then call me back over. I've noticed that most students naturally go back and correct the questions that they have got wrong after this.


Sometimes I look back at work earlier in week and check understanding re that. If they aren't sure re their response, I leave them and give them time to do it before I return.

The beauty of this is that it isn't really any extra work- I'm just having a written record of what is happening verbally within my classroom. It requires me to have a quality individual conversation with every single student during the (2hr) lesson. So forces me to reduce teacher talk to the whole class and plan an activity where they learn but can work autonomously. I used to worry I would not get around every body but at various points I ask them to remind me if I have missed anyone and it works out.

As we have a normal conversation anyway, students don't ignore my comments and are fine responding to them in writing as we already have verbally.

I'm finding out some interesting things too. I saw a graph had been crossed out and asked the student why. They then gave a beautiful and detailed explanation of how after seeing somebody else's work they realised that the "jumps were wrong" so decided to start again. I write my question down and asked then to write exactly what they had told me as it clearly demonstrated that they had taken on board the need for correct scale. Then I responded to their comment too.

True dialogue about maths and all done as part of regular class routine. Result.

Lets hope that my colleagues A and M feel that my method has an impact on students learning when we complete our peer work scrutiny in the next within the next week.

I don't understand sir! How it feels to be a student

Today I experienced what it was like to be a student in a maths lesson who didn’t know anything about a topic.  As a math teacher is admittedly was an unusual situation for me to be in but was very powerful.

 

Today was my colleague, CM’s  turn to chair our morning maths meeting and he had set us the homework of watching a clip prior to the meeting, much like we have been trialling with many of our KS4 and KS5 students in a bid to make them more independent (it’s also known as flipped learning).

 

As an interesting twist, the clip was related to an area of maths that I am not very familiar with, called decision maths. In fact it is a new module that I have introduced in A- level and is new to most of the maths department.

 

Just like a true student, I clicked on the homework last night before I went home. Saw that the clip was 20mins  and decided that it was too long so I’d do it the following morning just before the meeting. Fast forward to today and I’m sitting in my office at 7.45am  trying to understand what a bubble algorithm is, having never heard of it in my life.

 

Then I went it to the meeting, which my colleague had set up as a lesson, complete with mini whiteboards, pens and starter activity.  This is where he separated the sheep from the goats.  The first question was one that only made sense if we had done the h/w.

 

At this point 9 maths teachers were transformed into a class of students. Some of us had no idea what it was having not done the h/w, others had watched the clip but had not really understood it, some thought they’d done it at some vague point in the past,  some had watched and tried but weren’t confident about their answers.

 

At this point CM used the answers from the whiteboard to arrange us into groups so that those who understood could explain to those who didn’t by giving us alternative example to take them through.  It’s quite an interesting experience explaining a mathematical concept to a colleague that you are not even sure that you have grasped yourself.  It’s how students must feel all the time.

 

Soon our 10 min meeting was up and CM had raised some interesting points.

If we set flipped h/w

·         How do  account for the fact that not all students will do it (partially addressed by his demonstration)

·         What do we do in class for those that have to move on their learning?  More questions of the same is not really moving them on.

·         What is the hook to make them want to look at this h/w before hand. Why should they do it?

 

So as a subject specialist, maybe it’s worth spending  some time in a meeting learning something new from your own subject together.  Experience how students feel and what helps you to learn, it could help you to become a better teacher.

 

...........................................................................................................................................................

Comments re this post are welcome below as CM is a bit shy re posting himself but would like to see what others think re what he tried.

Canons High Student Pedagogy Day: Impressions from the Outside

Last Wednesday was out first-ever Student Pedagogy Day at Canons.  I don't want to say too much about it in this post as there will be other posts in the next week, but suffice it to say that the day was in essence an INSET for students.  During it we introduced them to much of the same professional learning undertaken by adults in our staff INSET days since June 2012. 

Whilst all this was going on I welcomed some visitors to the school to share with them our work over the past three or so years in developing a bottom-up pedagogy of which the Student Pedagogy Day is the latest achievement.  As well as hearing from me and others about the nature of our work these visitors also took part in the day, visiting classrooms to observe and participate.

The purpose of this post is to share with you the feedback we received from some of these visitors.

Thank you for your invitation to attend the Student Pedagogy Day at Canons High School. The concept of such a day as "INSET for Students" is innovative and one where the students can engage with the concept of Accelerated Learning and be able to understand this method of pedagogy within their education.

I was very impressed with the detailed background that you provided on the Canons Outstanding Pedagogy Project and the impact that this has had to date at Canons High School. It certainly has inspired me to think about introducing some of these ideas into my own school.

The work that the Pedagogy Leaders have out towards creating the day from its planning to creating its resources and implementation is fantastic. 

I would also like to extend my thanks to the teachers and students who welcomed me as a visitor to see the work that they were doing in their workshops.

 

 

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the student Inset Pedagogy day at Canons High School.  I have to admit to attending out of curiosity - but also out of a longstanding interest in what a school that puts pedagogy first might look like. Coming from a different age cohort setting, I going to say from the off that I found such young learners engaging in teaching and learning discussions pretty amazing.

I was lucky to sit in on a class where the learners were thinking/discussing questioning. They looked at several way to find out the answers to their questions without asking the teacher. This involved not only individual input but also peer assessment which at one stage involved a young man saying in response to why he shouldn't ask direct questions:

"Because then I won't know how to work it out for myself.

I won't understand how to do it again."

I was pretty amazed at children being able to appreciate the value of learning as a journey, rather than a destination, and his mature reflections will stay with me as I go on to teach and answer, or not, questions from much older learners. He was not afraid to take risks, which I think is fair to generalise to the whole class. They were resilient learners, and we're not afraid to offer wrong answers under the skilled supervision of their teacher.

In the second session I saw group evaluations of how to ask effective questions - again employing techniques I had never seen outside PGCE training. All in, I skipped out of the class amazed at the high level of professional language being used and the extent to which the learners not only understood this language but also took it on board. Ladies and Gentleman, this is what we call buy-in.

I understand there were some issues with this being a new programme. However, the planning of the day was impressive and quite an undertaking. How amazing is it to be in a place of learning as the learners take the teachers along with them rather thn the other way round? I left feeling very inspired. Yes- the staff are amazing. Yes- SLT have had to TRUST that these changes would happen. But do you know what? From an outsiders perspective I saw innovation and resilience at its best, and I feel a better teacher for it. 

 

 

Thank you for the invitation to the Canons Student Pedagogy Day.  The day was a fascinating insight into the innovative and original work you are doing at Canons to develop a school-wide outstanding curriculum.

The highlight of the day for me was seeing the engagement, confidence and knowledge of the students with the Accelerated Learning Cycle, which they had clearly consolidated from their morning session. Their enthusiasm for the ‘desert island’ activity was also infectious, their creative solutions to the problems facing them while stranded on a desert island without a teacher were both impressive and entertaining.

It was lovely as well to see the passion from the teachers delivering the sessions who were knowledgeable and equally enthusiastic with their presentation of the student-led lessons. The day has left me with many ideas and much inspiration for how the pedagogy of a school can be improved and adopted from a truly bottom-up approach.

 

 

Firstly, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, it was wonderful to listen to you tell the story of how you have 'organically' developed teaching and learning at Canons as so often people want to take the sparkly things from outstanding schools without understanding the hard work and strategy behind it.

 

Several things have resonated strongly with me about your approach: one is the amount of investment there has been in growing not just outstanding practitioners but the leadership of teaching and learning in the school; from the sub group of SLT, to the Outstanding Pedagogy Project group, the Teacher Learning Community groups and the Pedagogy leaders. Though you describe your approach as growing from the bottom up rather than being all mapped out, the structures of leadership which support it seem very coherent.  I am very keen to develop an OPP group and perhaps Ped leaders at my school.

 

I also really like the way that you have broken down the outstanding criteria and then analysed phrases in your lesson observation feedback, as a way of feeding back both to teachers, but also on the observers. I'm definitely going to do this with our most recent set of feedback forms as I think sometimes teachers see 'outstanding' as unobtainable and the marginal gains approach seems like a brilliant way to support teachers to develop their own practice.

 

Finally, inviting us in to see the first go at a student Pedagogy INSET day was great, it shows great confidence to share 'a work in progress' and I enjoyed it very much.   We continue to try to find ways to involve student voice in teaching and learning, but I had not considered this approach myself.  It was great to see the word 'pedagogy' on the student timetables for the day (something which I perhaps shy away from using, even with staff) and there were high expectations of the level of language about learning which the students  were expected to access.  The students and staff were all welcoming, please thank the Ped Leaders who shared their experiences and the teachers whose sessions I sat in on.

 

 

It is always lovely to get warm feedback from visitors, but I'm sure that you will agree that this is glowing praise in a number of places:  "innovative", "inspired", "fantastic", "amazing", "will stay with me", "impressive", "resonated", "coherent", "brilliant", "high expectations", "welcoming", "infectious".

 

If you are reading this and wanting to know more about the work we have done in developing a Canons Pedagogy then have a trawl through the posts on this blogsite.  If you like what you read there then give us a call or send an email to kbartle@canons.harrow.sch.uk. We are always happy to share expertise and these contacts give Canons an opportunity to learn from your work too, making the sharing mutually beneficial, which can't be a bad thing.

The importance of making mistakes

I am a proud advocate of making mistakes. As a languages teacher (and life-long language learner) I am proud to say that making mistakes has helped me to learn and teach three modern foreign languages, and I hope that I never stop making mistakes! Why am I so keen to keep getting things wrong? Well, as I tell the children that I teach, I’d rather you give it a go, get it wrong and learn from the experience, than never try at all. Where would be the fun in that?!

Let me share an embarrassing (and, with hindsight, rather funny) example of when I made a mistake on my own language learning journey. During my time in Italy as part of my overseas placement for my undergraduate degree, I was working as an English Language Assistant at a high school in Milan. Although most of the time I was speaking in English with the students with whom I was working, there was the occasional moment when I needed to communicate with them in Italian if something was not understood, or a translation was required. When I thought I’d said something along the lines of “I would discourage the use of an online translator” to the class (using the Italian verb ‘scoraggiare’), my utterance was immediately followed by a roar of laughter from the 30 fifteen-year-olds and the 60-something year old teacher that seemed to rattle windows and reverberate through me. Huh?! What had I said that was so funny? Well, as the teacher tried to explain to me, struggling to succumb to a schoolgirl-like giggling fit, I had mistakenly used a very similar verb that carried an altogether different meaning – ‘scoreggiare’ – meaning ‘to fart’. You can imagine my dismay. Enough said on that matter!

Needless to say, I learnt from this mistake, and it is a mistake that I will never make again, I doubt! And although it may have been embarrassing at the time, I can look back now and smile J.

As human beings, many of us seem to fear/dislike/avoid failure. We don’t want to appear as weak, defunct, not good enough, or dare I say – stupid. We have reputations to uphold, goals to reach; this must suggest that making mistakes will only slow us down, get in the way of our trajectory, or make other people think less of us. There is a name for this – atychiphobia. From the Greek phóbos, meaning "fear" or "morbid fear" and atyches meaning "unfortunate", it is the abnormal, unwarranted, and persistent fear of failure. As with many phobias, atychiphobia often leads to a constricted lifestyle, and is particularly devastating for its effects on a person’s willingness to attempt certain activities (thanks Wikipedia for that explanation!).

Granted, I don’t believe that the vast majority of the students we teach suffer from such an intense phobia in this way, or at least I hope they don’t! However, if too much pressure were to be placed on us to get something right all the time, whether it be by our families, friends, teachers, then the very idea of getting something wrong along the way would probably be perceived negatively by the student. Attributing a negative connotation to the act of making a mistake is something that probably all of us do, not just the children we teach. This can’t be good for what we’re trying to achieve in our classrooms and beyond.

What I’m hoping to do is to break down this misconception that making mistakes is a bad thing. This is certainly what I’m trying to impart on the students that I see each day. This is a challenge, though. It is almost instinctual to think that mistakes are bad. If presented with the choice of saying something that contained a mistake or something that didn’t, I don’t think anyone would opt for the former.

However, making mistakes is an important part of the learning process, not just in language learning, but in any area. Niels Bohr (1885-1962), a Danish physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for making foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, once said that, “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field”. Wise words from a very wise man.

We need to question things, not understand something straight away, get something wrong, ask yourself what and why something is wrong, figure out what something would look like if it were correct. If we did everything correctly the first time around, I wonder whether we would retain the information as easily. Is it a linear process of accepting something as a given, regurgitating it for a test and moving on to the next thing, or is the learning process a bit more jagged, a bit messier, a bit rough around the edges? Do we learn by not getting it right the first time, maybe not even the second, third or fourth time? Do the mistakes we make along the way actually help us to understand why something is the way it is? It raises the question of how we learn, and it is a question that has an infinite number of theories and approaches and opinions attached to it. It is very much open to interpretation, so I will leave that interpretation open for you to ponder as you do the ironing or walk the dog.

Something that my MFL colleagues and I have been trying with our Year 8 students is presenting them with common mistakes made by learners of Spanish, and asking them to identify where the mistake is in a sentence, explain why it is a mistake, and demonstrate what it should look like, explaining why it is now correct.

What I found to be particularly interesting with this activity was that these students were easily able to identify what was wrong with the sentence and re-draft a correct version, yet they struggled to articulate exactly why it was wrong, even when they were given the opportunity to discuss their thoughts with other students. I was impressed with their instinct for spotting the error and amending it, but what they appeared to lack was the ability to verbalise the nitty-gritty.

I think that the first time I tried this activity I was a bit disheartened by the fact that they weren’t able to explain why they knew the right answer. Somehow, just knowing what the right answer was, wasn’t enough! What I really wanted was for them to learn from the mistake. But then I thought to myself, this is the first time I’ve asked them to do an evaluation activity of this sort (aside from simply peer- and self-assessment activities that simply check whether answers are right or wrong). Like everything in learning, it is a skill that needs to be practised and developed. I hope that, with perseverance, these activities will help learners to see the usefulness of making mistakes, but more importantly, truly learning from them. In this way, hopefully they will avoid making the same mistake in the future, freeing them up to make new mistakes and restart the learning cycle.

 

An outstanding lesson is...

An outstanding lesson is... nobody noticing that the bell has gone.

An outstanding lesson is... "Miss that was good today, can we do it again?"

An outstanding lesson... asks why.

An outstanding lesson is... empowering

An outstanding lesson... moves beyond levels.

An outstanding lesson... sees mistakes as opportunities to learn

An outstanding lesson... delights in the journey not just the destination.

An outstanding lesson is... "After yesterday I went and  found this out- can you
have a look?"

An outstanding lesson is... spontaneous heated debate among students about the correct method to solve an equation.

An outstanding lesson is..."Sir, Mohammed explained how to do that question to me- can you give him a Vivo?"

An outstanding lesson is... GCSE pupils creating something on the A- level syllabus on their own initiative, unawares,  as a response to a fellow pupi'ls question.

An outstanding lesson is.... "Sir, I've prepared a lesson for today after that thing we did the other week. Can I teach it tomorrow?"

An outstanding lesson... allows students to cut their own keys to their own lock.

An outstanding lesson is... a lesson where the teacher doesn't say a single word for an hour but the students all move forward in their understanding.

An outstanding  lesson is... a series of what ifs?

An outstanding lesson... always follows the learning but it may not follow the plan.

An outstanding lesson is... so much more that a check list.

This post was inspired by the "Love is..." series that used to be in our Sunday paper when I was a child.