When ‘high expectations’ aren’t enough

“High expectations” of students: it’s a ‘Q Standard’ on the PGCE, it’s a ‘Core Standard’ for an NQT, and it’s in many job descriptions I’ve seen for teaching posts. What are high expectations worth if you can’t make them happen? I’ve found it useful to analyse the situations where expectations aren’t met and try to remove any limiting factors to give students the best chance possible of meeting them in the future.

I recently asked another teacher at school to observe me with my most difficult class. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m lucky enough to work in a school where teachers are open and supportive when it comes to observations and they’re used mostly for personal reflection and improvement. After this particular lesson, the meeting for feedback from the observing teacher was a very positive experience and one piece of advice in particular stuck with me.

I was trying to start the lesson silently with the students attempting a settling ‘entrance activity’, as they do in nearly all of my lessons. As usual with this class it was a struggle to get them to stay silent, despite numerous attempts on my part, and in the end it didn’t really happen. My colleague picked up on this and also observed that part of the reason that it wasn’t silent in the classroom was that I was doing the register at the same time. As a result it was much harder for me to identify when or which students were talking, because a) I wasn’t fully concentrating on it and b) calling out the register (and the replies) was all sound that could mask the students’ low-level murmuring.

The advice I got was to do the register silently if possible, or slightly later in the lesson when silence wasn’t required. I couldn’t simply ask for and expect silence, I had to be active in making it happen: providing every opportunity for students to comply, and avoiding any factor that made that harder for them.

In most lessons since then I’ve changed the way I start them. The task is displayed for students to begin immediately, I stand at the front for several minutes doing very little other than watching them carefully and picking up on off-task behaviour. As a result my lessons now begin in genuine silence, with every single student engaged with a task that prepares them for learning, and this has a significant impact on the entire lesson (I still think it’s odd that, on reflection, the way in which the students begin the lesson can dictate the atmosphere for the entire hour). In my opinion one simple change has improved my whole classroom practice.

One point to be made from all of this is that high expectations of student achievement and behaviour don’t mean much without actively making them a reality; and that in order to do so it’s worth analysing what the limiting factors are so that you can get rid of them.

Second Year Teaching

Take the time to jot down what went well in one lesson every week, or every day if you can. Get colleagues to observe you as often as possible, and return the favour. Reflecting on your teaching is the only way to improve it.

One of the things I’ve found hardest about being a second-year teacher is the lack of observed lessons I’ve had. Some might find that surprising, given how stressful an observed lesson can be to plan and deliver, but it’s only now that they’ve become so infrequent that I’ve realised how valuable they are.

During both PGCE year and NQT year I was getting so much feedback about my teaching it was hard to act on it because there was so much to consider. When planning each lesson I was drawing on several pieces of advice from each of four or five different teachers, some of which was entirely conflicting. The challenge was in selecting one or two targets to focus on for each lesson. This was much more the case during my PGCE, but it felt similar on my NQT year given how quickly observations by line mangers/senior leaders/mentors seemed to come around.

This year has provided a new challenge: going long periods of time without any feedback and thus relatively little guidance about my teaching. I still reflect on my practice but now it’s a solo experience, and something I have to remind myself to do as often as possible.

Any teacher that thinks back on a lesson they just taught is sure to be able to identify a couple of simple ways to improve it next time, but the important and difficult bit is taking the time to write it down (and to read it again when it matters). I personally find that Evernote is a brilliant tool for this – I write a quick ‘What Went Well’ and ‘Even Better If’ on my phone on the commute home.

Even more importantly, a few teachers and I have formed a set of ‘coaching trios’ in our department. Every half term or so we observe one other teacher’s lesson and help them reflect on how to improve. I couldn’t recommend it enough. Every time I’ve been ‘coached’ by a colleague in this way I’ve had incredibly relevant advice, and also been given an opportunity to be proud of all the little things I get right. Everyone needs a little praise!

Without reflecting on your practice, with or without someone to talk to about it, you might not take the time to acknowledge what you achieve every day, and on the other hand may end up making the same mistakes every lesson. The trap of second-year teaching.

“Real Graphs from Real Data” – an IOP workshop session

I was at the ASE Conference in Liverpool last week (my first ASE conference and first time in Liverpool!). There were so many useful talks and workshops that I frequently wanted to be in three or more places at once – I strongly recommend it if you haven’t been lucky enough to go yet.

The Institute of Physics in particular ran a huge number of high quality sessions, mostly workshops for practical activities, and I’ll use this post to share the ideas from one of them. (Thanks to Alex Birchmore for taking notes in this session and sharing them with me).

“Real Graphs from Real Data”

The session started with attendees contributing activity ideas for teaching reliability, repeats, precision and taking measurements, for example devising ways of measuring the thickness of paper, the mass of grain of rice, the time taken for cart to roll down track, etc. We were then introduced to a new activity idea along the same lines.

Equipment needed: Per group: 1 x A3 paper; 1 x A4 card; 5 x plastic or polystyrene cups with a hole cut in each of the rims; 1 x aluminium ruler (with ridge down the centre); 1 x marble.

Setting up: Fold the A4 card into a triangle and lean the ruler on it to make a ramp. Rest the other end of the ruler on the A3 paper, on which you draw the axes of a graph.

The investigation runs by positioning a plastic/polystyrene cup at the bottom of the ramp with the hole facing the ramp. You roll the marble down the ramp, it goes into the hole, hits the inside of the cup and moves it along the graph. Mark where it ended up, then repeat – inevitably the result is slightly different every time.

The independent variable can then be ‘number of cups’. You repeat the procedure with the cups stacked up, and the more cups you have the smaller the distance they travel along the graph.

I really liked this activity because of how quick, simple and fun it was, with potentially such a lot of learning opportunities.

Potential uses and discussion points

• Modelling good graph drawing
• Control variables – ask students to identify what they ought to keep the same each time (e.g. angle of ramp)
• ‘True value’ – is there one?
• Lines of best fit
• Confidence and error bars – this practical gives instant error bars, which can then be adjusted depending on the desired confidence level. As the distance decreases, the absolute certainty obviously decreases to, but a few calculations reveal that the percentage certainty stays the same.

I’m considering asking to include this activity in the department’s Year 7 ‘Becoming a Scientist’ scheme of work, where we already introduce some very simple principles of scientific enquiry.

Review of ‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr

I bought ‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr because I wanted to get a flavour of how growing up in the age of the internet might affect how my students learn. I’d recommend this book to anyone with a similar interest, or alternatively you could have a look at Carr’s blog. This post is my summary of the just the key ideas in the book and how I think they relate to education.

The book itself combines history, psychology, and neuroscience to map the multitude of changes in information technology since the earliest evidence of reading and writing (8000BC), and the associated changes in the way humans think and remember. In the first chapter, Carr mentions that recently he has been aware that his brain has been changing significantly, and he is “not thinking the way [he] used to think”. My concern is that any influence that the internet has over our brains could be even more significant in young people today, who have been exposed to it almost as soon as they started to think.

The main idea behind this book is that using the internet in the way most people do these days has negative impacts on the way we read, think and remember. Carr devotes several chapters to each one of these areas, each containing both psychological and neurological research to support his claims. I’ll summarise one of his arguments below and two others in a future post. (If the justification for some of his ideas seem a bit ropey here, do read the book because he explains it a lot better than I can!)

Thinking

The net reduces our attention spans, says Carr. We get used to instant gratification and become adept at analysing large numbers of visual and auditory cues in a short space of time. However, research suggests this is detrimental, and that ability to retain information is reduced when there are hyperlinks and easy access to other interesting content, like email and Facebook. The internet is increasing our ability to multitask but at the expense of our creativity, productivity, and inventiveness.

In his book, Carr gives lots of examples of studies that support this idea, and it’s one that seems very plausible to me. In the past, young people would have had more opportunities to focus their attention on one thing, which would allow for deeper thinking than when attention is constantly shifting from one thing to another.

The implication for education today is that living in an internet age allows young people fewer opportunities than ever to think deeply. Therefore, it’s more important than ever that teachers provide their students with support and encouragement to use higher-order thinking skills. With modern mobile technologies the ability to recall information is becoming less and less important (Wikipedia-on-the-go is something I now take for granted). The thinking skills that are more valuable as a result are those found nearer the top of Bloom’s taxonomy.

What are your thoughts on all of this? Is anyone aware of a change in the way think as a result of internet use?

Learning From Last Year

Teaching, I’m told, is a craft. There’s always more to learn, always ideas you haven’t yet tried, and usually a development or two from educational research suggesting how to adapt our practice for the better.

This being the start of my second year of teaching (I prefer ‘my QT year’), I’m on a steeper learning curve than most. I made a lot of mistakes last year that I’ll be doing my best to avoid, but even many of the ideas that went really well will be a target for further improvement. For me, it’s one of the great attractions of a career in education that the challenge of self-improvement never disappears. Every student deserves a teacher who is willing to learn.

I want to share a short summary of what I want to do differently this year. I’d welcome any comments and suggestions!

• Explicitly teach good behaviour: For younger (KS3) students, I intend to teach what good behaviour actually looks like in a range of contexts (e.g. class discussion, individual work, group work). During the summer I read a book called ‘Assertive Discipline’ by Lee Canter, and one of the main messages I took from it was that ‘responsible behaviour’ cannot be assumed to be understood by students and must be taught. I’ll do this by modelling it, then having students practice it and eventually master it.
• Insist on a calm start to every lesson: Last year my tolerance of disorderly starts to many lessons had a remarkable impact on those lessons, so this year I intend to be relentless until the routines are established.
• More phone calls home: I called students’ parents fairly frequently last year to give both positive and negative feedback, but as far as I can tell the more it’s done the more beneficial the effect on students’ learning. One of the features of KIPP schools in the US that seems to make them so successful (based on another book I read this summer!) is the insistence on a close and positive relationship between teachers and parents, facilitated by frequent phone calls and home visits. I won’t go as far as visiting students’ homes(!) but the benefits of the close relationship seem obvious.
• Make written feedback relate directly to the student’s next task: This is a way for me to try increasing the effectiveness of the very time-intensive process of comment-only marking. Miserably, I often found that the detailed feedback I was giving last year was going unread! Wherever I can this year I’ll try to plan activities that follow on from the last set of written feedback, thus making it more relevant and likely to be used.
• Do more demos, do fewer practicals: This idea is specific to Science teaching, and I intend to dedicate a whole post to it in the future because I know it’ll be controversial. In short, I feel that when the primary aim of a practical is ‘discovery’, the best opportunity for learning is through a demo with carefully mediated discussion, to elicit and challenge misconceptions. I’ll use practicals, but mostly when I want to explicitly teach a particular HSW skill like ‘choosing appropriate variables’.

I’m really interested in what other teachers will be doing differently this year than last year. In other words, what are your #newtermresolution s? Please leave a comment below, or better yet tweet me @teachgr or with the #newtermresolution hashtag.

The Brilliant Question Awards

I’d like to share an idea I’ve been using in lessons called the ‘Brilliant Question Awards’. This, like all of my best ideas, was adapted (stolen) from a more experienced teacher. The idea is to encourage deep thinking and independent enquiry, which of course is vital in science but useful in just about any subject.

It’s simple: whenever a student asks a question that a) relates to the learning objectives, and b) extends the learning beyond the original content of the lesson, they get a ‘Brilliant Question Award’ card and they write their question on a space on the whiteboard. When a student has collected five cards over the course of a school year, they can trade them in for a prize (science-related of course). Prizes have included stationery from the Science Museum, cheap books about the periodic table, self-heating hand-warmers, and sachets of hydrophobic sand (also from the Science Museum).

When students ask a Brilliant Question during a lesson they receive this card.

I’ve been using this reward system for a couple of terms and I’ve been really pleased with the results. I’ve noticed a change in the atmosphere in lessons: students are less afraid of asking ‘stupid’ questions. This has been particularly helpful for my lower-set classes, where even the least confident of students are rewarded for taking part in class discussions. For my higher-set classes these cards become the focus for competition: some students use almost every class discussion as an opportunity to ask a Brilliant Question in order to win more cards than their peers.

I think these cards are effective because formulating a question requires a lot of higher-order thinking skills, especially with the requirements that the ‘Brilliant Question Award’ imposes. Students have to consider what they already know and what they don’t know, and often how to relate this to everyday or novel situations.

It also means that over the course of a week or two, the whiteboard gets filled with deep questions relating to the topics we’re covering in lessons.

Brilliant Questions get recorded on the whiteboard by the student that asked them.

Some of my favourites of the ones you can see above are ‘Why can’t our bodies fight against cancer?’ (in a topic about microbes and disease), ‘Why does fire stay up when you put it upside-down?’ (in a topic about heat transfer), and ‘When you freeze a liquid it turns solid but when you heat pancake mixture which is liquid, why does it turn solid?’.

What I haven’t discussed is how I respond to the questions. I’m still working on this aspect of the Brilliant Question Awards. Originally I decided I wouldn’t answer the questions myself, but allow other students to try to answer them. This had some good results that encouraged lots of students to get involved with trying to explain answers, but it also left many questions unanswered. I’ve moved on to saying ‘I want YOU to give me the answer when we’ve covered a little bit more of this topic, the idea being that students will look out for information that helps them to answer their own question. This hasn’t worked as well as I’d hoped because, again, so few of the questions end up with an answer.

I’ve really enjoyed using the Brilliant Question Awards and I’m happy to share the idea. I’m still tweaking the system and I’d be glad for any advice and feedback!

If you want to try it yourself, you can make decent looking personalised cards at Vistaprint.com, which I used because their business card templates worked nicely and the first order you make is free except for postage. There are tons of places to find prizes too, but keeping it cheap is a challenge – any suggestions would be welcome.

Advice for secondary NQTs

I officially completed my NQT year last Friday 22nd July. It was an incredible feeling. A lot of people have asked how my first year went, which is a question I’ve found very difficult to answer. I settled on the response ‘it was one the most significant years of my life.’ It was extremely challenging in many different ways, but equally rewarding too.

I’m proud of everything I did and accomplished this year, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t do some things differently if I could do it all again! This post is for all secondary-school NQTs – I’d like to give you the bits of advice I wish I’d had (or acted upon) at the start of my first year of teaching.

1. Design a Behaviour Plan

One of the bits of advice I heard most often prior to starting teaching was to be ‘firm but fair’, and actually it was perhaps the least helpful. It made me focus on being fair, which for me translated into being lenient - being reasonable, giving second chances, listening to excuses. Of course consistency is vital (students respond less to the severity of sanctions and more to the consistency with which they are applied) but I personally would have benefited more from designing my own clear behaviour plan and enforcing it religiously. Your school will have its own policy but there will always be parts that are open to interpretation, and it will tend to be fairly general (if my school was anything to go by).

I designed my own behaviour plan after the first term, and wished I had done so sooner. I sat down with a fellow NQT and we each suggested as many ‘behaviour scenarios’ as we could, and in each scenario we decided what we would do about it. We soon covered the scenarios we had already had to deal with and moved on to those we imagined might happen at some point.

My advice then: before you start, design a behaviour plan, so as to be completely clear with yourself and with the students about what your expectations are, and what will happen if they are not met. Then be absolutely relentless about following this through (even when it could appear unreasonable). Don’t let anything go!

2. Gather Evidence Often

As teacher that is ‘newly qualified’ you inevitably have the additional challenge of collecting evidence for the ‘Core Standards’. Find out early on from whoever will be assessing you just what kind of evidence they are looking for. Once you know this you can be on the look out for opportunities to gather it – whether it’s photocopying examples of written feedback, printing out email correspondence with parents/TAs/teachers, etc. It may seem obvious, but ‘little and often’ is by far the best approach here. Spending a whole day of my half-term holidays catching up on evidence, when I could have been preparing lessons (or not) was miserable.

3. Prioritise

Improving my time-management was a massive hurdle for me this year. As an NQT you have so many more responsibilities and admin work than during a PGCE, and there are times when you need to cut corners or completely scrap some tasks. People deal with this in different ways and prioritise differently, but here is my advice in handy sentence-long chunks:

1. Get organised (sorry to sound patronising) – make your resources easy to find, record your plans for later, etc.
2. If a task doesn’t directly help students, and you won’t get in trouble for not doing it, don’t do it.
3. Make sure the quality of your lessons remains a high priority, mainly because the more often they go badly the more miserable you’ll feel and the harder your job will be.
4. Try not to take work home – this can be tough but makes a big difference to work/life balance.

4. Plan Less

One of the biggest changes in the way I taught over the course of the year was that I ended up planning less – both in terms of detail of my lesson plans and the amount of work I expected students to do in one lesson. Before each lesson, you really only need to plan one or two main activities that the students can be getting on with. Then during the lesson you need to be able to adapt. Learn a small repertoire of plenaries that you can use week-in week-out. Set lots of extension tasks for when students finish early, preferably tasks that don’t require planning like: getting students to design a plenary quiz; assigning them as ‘learning monitors’ to give feedback about who is making the most progress; or redesigning a lesson activity to make it harder/easier.

This advice is based partly on my experience of planning beautifully detailed lessons that were ruined through student apathy/poor behaviour, and partly because including student-led activities is simply good teaching.

I hope you found this advice useful. There’s a lot more out there – see the NQT Survival Guide which will be published later this year, having been written by lots of teachers collaborating via Twitter and Google Docs. Twitter itself is a massively useful source of advice (especially the #ukedchat hashtag), as are the forums on TES New Teachers.