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.

Canons High Student Pedagogy Day Invitation

Practitioner-Led INSET: Casting the Net Wider

I have already blogged about last Monday's INSET Day here, but that was merely about the opening session of the day on Marginal Learning Gains.  Whilst that was a wonderful start to the day, I have to say that the real magic happened once I stopped speaking at the end of that session.

Up until last Monday our four Outstanding Pedagogy Project INSET Days since June 2012 had all been fabulous in terms of content and had been extremely favourably reviewed by our wonderful staff, but they had lacked two vital ingredients that I think make a truly exceptional INSET Day:  an element of choice for those on the receiving end and the corollary of wider engagement of in-school expertise in the delivery of the day's sessions.

And so it was that when I sat down with my Pedagogy Leader colleagues Aarti Sharma, Rebecca Howard (@MissHowardCHS) and Joe Freeman (@biomadhatter) to plan the details of the day late in November that there were only two elements of the day that I felt were non-negotiable. The first of these was the theme of 'Evaluation' (more on this below) and the second was that we ran enough sessions during the course of the day to enable our teachers to have a significant amount of choice about what it was that they went to see and hear and experience. They were, as Joe has said to me in the past, on it like tonic (No? Me neither!).

Having spent INSET time on the Accelerated Learning Cycle, on key classroom techniques for learning, upon collaborative planning and upon coaching for both pedagogy and leadership we had agreed that this last major planned INSET day would be on the topic of in-class evaluation. Earlier this year, and following two years of Masters study into assessment practices, I launched our school's "Evaluation, Appraisal and Assessment Policy". The three-pronged title of the policy was related to an underestimated document produced by the then Department for Children, Schools and Families on Assessment for Learning that identified three core timings of assessment: the day-to-day, the periodic and the transitional. My belief in writing the policy was that the focus in our classrooms had become too level or grade oriented and that there was a loss of focus on the qualitative nature of day-to-day assessment.

For this reason the policy includes the statement "we believe that the primary mode for helping students to improve their understanding and, as a consequence, their performance against national expectations, is day-to-day teacher, peer and self-evaluation".

Further to this the policy (which spans only two sides of a bright green sheet of paper) lists seven elements of what our priorities are for in-class evaluation of student performance. These are written in a form of preferences, and are:

- Qualitative information about achievement is more powerful than quantitative data

- Open-ended tasks offer better learning opportunities than closed-ended ones

- Collaborative working enables students to develop better than individual working

- Teacher observation of learning is more effective for students than teacher marking

- Instand feedback and feed-forward is more engaging than retrospective evaluation

- Self-discovery, through exploratory learning is more powerful than teacher-led learning

- Interdependent interactions stimulate learning better than independent thinking

The policy then warns against a 'false dichotomy' approach and says "while we value those features of teacher evaluation shown on the right hand side of each statement, we place more value on the features shown on the left hand side". For this reason we decided that our INSET Day on in-class evaluation should be practitioner-led (always the case these days at Canons) and about all those left hand side statements. Presented on the morning of the INSET they looked like this.

At that first meeting with the three Ped Leaders, having established the focus on evaluation and the principle of choice I left it up to them to identify how we would go about doing it. They decided that what they really wanted to do was throw it open to as many people as possible and create a series of four workshops with six choices: a total of 24 sessions for our teaching staff of 68. They like a challenge do our Ped Leaders!!

And so began the period of arm-twisting. Within a matter of a couple of weeks they had informed then discussed then persuaded then nagged then bribed then whatever else they could think of to get takers. We were helped by the fact that a number of our Heads of Departments wanted time with their teams in the afternoon and so we limited the workshop slots to three, meaning only 18 sessions were needed, but it was still some effort. Their main persuasive technique was to reassure staff that they weren't looking for something out of the ordinary in terms of either content or delivery style. Instead what they wanted was for the teachers involved in delivery to show what they do and in the way they do it: proper practitioner-led stuff.

Along the way we also decided that we wanted some mini-TeachMeets on the day, with 5 minute micro-presentations to complement the 45 minute workshop slots. We hoped we might get enough for one of these sessions but ended up with two (mainly because the Peds 'let people off' a longer session if they were willing to do a TeachMeet slot instead!!).

And so the running order for the workshop sessions ended up looking like this:

In all, including the TeachMeets, there were 19 members of staff (almost a third of our teachers) leading sessions to demonstrate their in-class evaluation strategies and techniques: from Punk Learning to Trajan's Column and from SOLO (at beginner and advanced levels) to CRESS feedback and from a Culture of Critique to Green Pen Policy. The contributions came from across the curriculum, across the range of experience and across the leadership spectrum and were all coordinated by three young teachers who had contributed to some of our previous INSETs but had never before led the organisation of one.

At the end of the day we asked staff to fill out two post it notes with What Went Wells and Even Better Ifs. Having had fabulous feedback from our previous three INSETs this was the bit that had me more than a little nervous. You see, when you cast the net wider in order to have more contributors to INSET in order to generate meaningful choice then you also have to let go: you have to sacrifice the certainty of tight quality control mechanisms and instead place your utter trust in the professionalism of your colleagues, all 19 of them.

When I saw the EBI flipchart sheet fill up my heart sank but I made myself (and my Ped Leader colleagues) look at the jam-packed WWW flipchart sheet first. What I saw there was amazing. Less sparkly than the praise for our previous INSET Days (although still sparkly enough) this praise was richer and deeper and altogether more satisfying. Twelve of the nineteen contributors were mentioned positively by name, eleven respondents mentioned the Punk Learning sessions and eight mentioned the TeachMeets as a positive part of the day.

On a more qualitative note, powerful phrases such as the day being a "chance to see excellent practitioners showing what they're good at" and being filled with "more hands on activity rather than listening to information" were extremely rewarding. Teachers repeatedly talked about the "variety" of workshops and the "thought-provoking" nature of them, with one colleague being particularly positive in saying "I would have liked another day to attend more sessions". The positive feedback fills two pages of a narrow-margined Word document and is a delight to read in terms if both immediate impact and phrases full of future intention such as "I felt that I had picked up bits of good practice that were marginal gains for my practice" and "some ideas that the English Department can definitely adapt".

Eventually I plucked up the confidence to turn to the EBIs. I needn't have been worried as fifteen of them were about departments being given more time "to put new ideas into practice" or "to develop the good ideas from today". This could hardly be called criticism and of the eighteen developmental comments not asking for more departmental time, seven were asking for more workshops or longer workshop sessions. Two others were asking for the materials for all the sessions to be made available and two others asking for outside speakers tonbe involved in the INSET. Only four of the comments were specifically negative about an aspect of the day. The old adage of not pleasing all the people all the time rings true, but this was as good as I've ever seen in terms of feedback for such a wide-ranging INSET Day.

So well done to the Ped Leader trio for their triumphant INSET Day. And well done too to the almost score of teachers who certainly hit the back of the net with their contributions to a fantastic piece of peer-led professional development.

Trajan's Column 1, 2 & 3

Last year I attended Cramlington Learning Festival and attended a session on large group activities run by Fergus Hegarty. During this session I took part in a Trajan's Column activity with around 20 other people. I never would have believed that a whole class could engage in a group task where they all contribute to one final product. I was wrong. In 20minutes we had created a column of information mapping the life of a Gorilla: birth, diet, habitat, old age etc. Our column included written information, key words, images and an object on the top reflecting the work as a whole. Since then, I have been working on this activity in lessons and with teachers as a way to engage large groups in interdependent learning.

Trajan's Column with Staff:
In the most recent INSET I delivered a session on Trajan's Column to a group of teachers. Their task was to recreate, in 20minutes, the play of Romeo & Juliet going up the column using a summary of the play (parts cut up like a card sort), key quotations and images. They also had to create an object to go on top. One member of staff quickly took charge, reading out the 1 set of instructions and starting a discussion of what tasks to tackle first. The group then split into 2 smaller groups with the females working on the play summary and quotations while the male teachers worked creatively and practically to create an object to go on top.

During the course of the activity the male group worked together and quite quickly had discussed and decided what they were going to create. The female group spent a lot more time discussing the events, re-reading instructions and making sure that they were on task. It was interesting to witness the discussions that occurred, watching questions being asked to seek clarification and affirmation that people were on the right track. Instead of sticking the summary parts and quotations onto to the column itself and reducing the lengthy summaries to key words and phrases, the group decided to create a paper chain of information, interlinking the summary and quotes together. The final object included two houses with daggers stuck to the top - an interpretation on the quote 'a plague o' both your houses.'

In discussion afterwards, the group discussed how the activity could be used as an evaluative tool at the end of a scheme but could similarly be used to introduce a topic. It was acknowledged that the males had perhaps 'opted out' slightly in that they did not come into contact with the summary details or quotes and this is something which would have to be considered in a classroom setting, perhaps by having smaller elements to the whole task which could be delegated or by removing the 'object' element altogether. Despite this, the discussion was rich and teachers were animated in talking about how the activity could be amended and tailored for their own subjects. One idea was to split the class into two groups and have two columns to allow more students to have more involvement.

Hence the next time I did Trajan's Column, it looked something like this....

Trajan's Column - An Inspector Calls
Today, with two different year 11 classes, I set about starting revision on An Inspector Calls for their Literature Exam. Having read the play last year I wanted a way to refresh their memories on the details of the play without tedious re-reading or research. I re-arranged the classroom before the lesson with tables in two separate groups and chairs all around. As the students came in I instructed them to sit with others that they felt they would work best with. In the morning lesson (a C/D borderline class), I ended up with a group of girls and a group of boys while the afternoon class (top set) was a lot more mixed. To start the lesson off I used some excellent audio files from TES of all three acts. The class listened and made notes in a study guide on the key events and details of the play.

Once finished with listening to the act summaries I introduced the main activity. The plastic poles were placed in the middle of the two groups with instructions on the top. Resources were left at the front of the room on desks for groups to collect as they needed. In the morning lesson, the two groups approached the task very differently. Both groups started off working together to organise the parts of the play. In the boys group, two separated quite quickly after this to set about making an object while the others started sticking paper to the pole and finding appropriate quotations to use. In contrast, the girls worked consistently together till very near the end. Only with 5minutes to go did 2 girls start cutting out objects for the top whilst the others set about making finishing touches using images and quotations. The end result was very different. When a colleague (@lLeahMirandaM) popped in to take a look she commented that the girls column was a lot more structured whilst the boys was more creative (see below for their interpretation of Inspector Goole, Nike trainers included!).

The afternoon class worked in a very similar way with groups discussing and delegating the tasks; some working on the summary, others on quotations and the rest on making objects and decorating material. As the class is a lot bigger the groups managed to complete the activity much quicker, in around 20minutes. Again their columns looked a lot different and in some ways I think the morning class took more pride in their work, the top set favouring speed over aesthetics. But the point is that it doesn't really matter what the columns look like. In both lessons the whole class had been involved in an interactive activity for an extended period of time where they were able to work together to create something that they could be proud of. They had to use their own notes from the first part of the lesson to reorganise the summary and the activity actually worked as a consolidation exercise. I definitely think that having two groups as opposed to one encouraged a higher level of participation from pupils and they were able to contribute a lot more, an idea which came from the INSET day.

The feedback I got from both classes was positive. They said that they enjoyed doing something more interactive and felt that creating something was a much better way of revising a text. The top set felt that the lesson was a nice way back into the text, especially after all the revision and essay writing that they'd been doing recently in preparation for their poetry exam - it wasn't even something I had considered when I was planning.

I truly believe that this acticity is fantastic for encouraging interdependent learning. I didn't answer one question in the time the pupils were working becuase they collaborated together to find answers, solve problems and ensure that they had completed all the instructions on the task sheet. This is defnitely an activity that I will be doing again and one that I believe can work well in any subject.

Pedagoo London

On Saturday I presented this activity at Pedagoo London. After much thought and deliberation I decided on the topic of fairy tales. I condensed Propp's morphology of a fairy tale into 14 key elements and provided these mixed up. In addition I chose 'Jack and the Beanstalk' by Roald Dahl and provided the 14 stanzas to the groups (also mixed up). The tasks were as follows:

• Re-arrange the structure of a fairy tale in the correct order.
• Re-arrange the fairy tale in the correct order.
• Re-create the fairy tale going up the column starting at the bottom using text, images and/or objects.
• Display the structure of the fairy tale down one side and if you can match these with the corresponding sections of the fairy tale. (This was a challenge as the fairy tale had violated the structure in many ways!)
• On the top create an object which represents the information displayed around the column.

In 15 minutes both groups had created completely different columns and had interpreted the instructions differently. The first group had attempted to match the structure to the story whilst the second group had focussed on the story only. Furthermore, the second group highlighted an issue with language and asked why if the fairy tale was going up then why would the structure go down. Although they eventually understood what I had meant, it shows how even the most basic of instructions can be interpreted in different ways. Afterwards, we discussed why it didn't matter that the structure couldn't be matched to the tale and how it could be used as a springboard to explore fairy tales and their structures in more detail. I also highlighted how this activity is probably best used at the beginning of a topic as a way in or as a revision tool.

For me, the session was great because all members of the group got involved and contributed their ideas in some way or another. Perhaps they didn't learn much content but for the purpose of the session my focus was to show how the activity could be used in the classroom and how it could engage large groups, something which I'd like to think I was successful in showing. This activity is so adaptable and so easy to set up. For one group, toilet roll holders were transformed into a beanstalk with leaves while in the other they made a bath filled with gold coins - it doesn't take much to get the imagination going!

I'd like to hope that this session has encouraged other teachers to use activities like this in their own pedagogy and am pleased that I was able to share this at such a great event!