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Evidence of Impact? Rational thinking...

26/1/2018

Making an impact?

I find that discussions with my Primary ITE trainees during feedback sessions allows illumination and clarification about their thinking and highlights areas where they would benefit from some fine-tuned advice. Where this leads to my own thinking after visits, I seek to share outcomes with the trainees through blogs.

A recent case in point is the need for ITE trainees to evidence their impact in learning. This needs to be against the teacher standards, so I’ve been exploring an approach which could allow them insights into this area, in so doing, seeking to provide quality evidence against the standards.

Teacher standard 8, professionalism, requires the trainee to be a self-developer, not over-reliant on the team or specific colleagues, asking professional questions and following through, more and more independently, with teaching and lines of enquiry. The following approach seeks to describe, simply, how this might be achieved. In so doing, the trainee will enhance their professionalism...

Yes, at the core is my articulation of 24652 as the significant elements that demonstrate the decision cycle, but, with a little tweaking, it might be possible to articulate thinking across the broader range of standards, based on the idea of rationale behind decisions, or capturing the thinking cycle.

3; All planning occurs within a subject context, whether in whole or part, eg phonics, reading as part of English. There is likely to be some cross curricular linkage, talk and writing, or mathematics in science, geography etc.
2,4,1; If a trainee is a full partner in the creation of either medium term or weekly plans, they are party to intentions and expectations of the children for which the plans are made, as these will be based on teacher and trainee knowledge of the current needs of the class.

4; If the trainee then has to plan for a series of lessons in the week, they have to create an internal rational narrative, which can be shared with the children at each stage; we are dong this because or “so that”.

8; making best use of the adults available to the lesson could be a key point for decisions. Who is best suited to the needs of the children?

6,5; Within each lesson, there may be moments where the trainee becomes aware that individuals, groups or the whole class is experiencing moments of insecurity. These moments have to be acted upon, investigating detailed needs, enabling rational in-lesson decisions, including reforming or remodelling the lesson to need. Making a note of these moments on plans captures the moment, which enables further reflection after the lesson, linked to any additional assessment judgements from additional adults.

2; The combined reflection provides a refined baseline point from which subsequent plans can be made. It would also provide outcome evidence that could support moderation discussion of outcomes and attempts to qualify statements about short term capability and, over time, of progress.

In running through this scenario, it could be possible for a trainee to evidence virtually every teacher standard, by annotation of, and reflective evaluation of plans, annotation of any collected work from key individuals resulting in an overall reflection at the end of a working week.

Coupled with evidence that may arise from observations by their mentor, and their weekly review meetings, the trainee should be able to highlight their secure areas and areas for further development.

At an agreed point, the trainee could also write a short summative report on their selected case study children, which could be discussed with their mentor. Annotations by the mentor would indicate levels of agreement and suggest areas for further consideration.

If, following this reflective evaluation, the trainee was able to share their thoughts with parents, this would offer further evidence for TS8 and also give insights into that area or responsibility, summarised with annotations on the reports.

This could be a stronger approach to securing the teacher standards, as a holistic exercise, rather than as single entities. We could judge the developing teacher as a reflective whole, not just their parts.

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As easy as ABC; developing a topic Glossary

18/1/2018

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Starting my teaching career before even a BBCB computer came into my classroom, some time in 1975/6, the library was the source of knowledge and sessions each week were devoted to “study skills”, which included using the non-fiction books to research aspects of the current topic.

Having taught the children to use the contents list and the index to begin a search, one regular feature of the topic was the glossary wall. This was a display that would now possibly be called a working wall. It was where the children’s exploration could be shared with the rest of the class, with a headed topic word and a description and perhaps a picture to show something that they had read and thought others would find interesting.

It was relatively simple, sometimes becoming a small item of homework; perhaps to go home and find three items for the alphabet wall, written as whole sentences.

Over the course of time, some letters were fuller than others, so challenges could be set to find words with the missing letters. During lessons, children might listen for the words that they had found, but also for new words. The form of “bingo” heightened awareness and interest.

Towards the end of the topic, the children would be charged with selecting words from those available to write their own personal glossary that would be done during handwriting, then to be used in a final piece of writing. Children could, at any other stage, “magpie” any words for any writing purpose.

It wasn’t difficult to organise, created a working display, with additional pictures from different sources and gave rise to some very good research activities, including from home. Occasionally a parent would identify themselves as an amateur or professional in a specific field, offering specialist knowledge. This was particularly useful in a topic on local buildings, where the local historical society and a builder parent came to talk.

An alternative approach to knowledge organisers? Adults can also add to, or start the glossary.

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Mentors 24652

17/1/2018

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Considering Post Graduate and School Direct short placements, planning for a successful experience.

Being such a short experience, the six/seven weeks will fly past very quickly, so, to maximise the potential for a successful practice I offer the following organisational insights from supervising previous experiences.

The first thing is to secure the personal professional standards as per this diagram.

This means being professional from the first contact with the new school to give the school confidence that the trainee is an appropriate person to be trusted with their children. There is an immediate need to find out about key policies, including safeguarding and behaviour management.

From the beginning, getting to know the children from talking to them, generally and about the work in their books helps to establish appropriate expectations. This will be added to with discussion of tracking documents and knowing where the teacher would like the children to be by the end of the period. Find out the themes and topics being covered and those specific areas where you will take a lead role. A good mentor ensures that the trainee has received as much detailed information as possible that will help them in their early decision making.

Two key messages to any trainee; know the children as well as possible and know your stuff…

The trainee, guided by their mentor, needs to create a personal development plan for the weeks of the experience. They need to put into the plan any specific areas that they need to observe, or experience, within this key stage, whether structural like planning or behaviour management, discussions with specific staff, to address any gaps in, or to broaden your understanding of different areas. Plan in any assignments that have to be completed within this timescale, particularly if they depend on interactions with children or staff. Professional time should be used effectively and trainees need to remember that colleagues fit conversations around their other jobs.

The practical teacher standards will need to be developed within the experience.

2; Progress and Outcomes or knowing the children, in class terms. The range of abilities, how they are organised for learning and tasking. Finding out about the school approach to assessment and feedback.

4; Planning. This will have school specific elements. Hopefully, trainees will be able to get the plans for the half term, from which weekly plans will be developed, by the trainee, so that daily and single lesson plans can fit into a weekly dynamic, allowing reflection, during the week, of the need to adapt and also to evaluate the progress made during the week.

6&5; While some assessment will be after each lesson, with the next lesson altered if there is an evident need, there is also a need to consider assessment within the lesson. Whereas a trainee may think that you have created the challenge within tasks appropriately, children will demonstrate, through a variety of means, that they do not understand something, or that they are finding the challenge too easy. It is important that this is spotted and dealt with fluently, so that children’s learning is not disjointed.

2; The loop is closed with evaluation of outcomes and greater understanding of the children, as a group, but also as individuals. The repetitive cycle enables a refining of understanding and of approaches.

Seeking to put this together into a coherent plan that allows for all these elements might be supported with the following model.

Going into their second experience, trainees will have already demonstrated a high degree of professionalism, as team players and future team leaders. They have been able to make good relationships with their class teachers and support staff, as well as with the children. They tend to be allocated to classrooms that are well ordered and organised, with good, positive behaviour management strategies enabling the teacher to teach and learning to occur.

The trainees themselves, by this stage, are generally well ordered and organised. They plan effectively and make sure that they have high quality resources available to enhance their lessons. The IWB is usually used to good effect and there is evidence of other technology being used to enhance learning, eg visualisers, cameras and iPads.

They all work hard to make sure that they have appropriate subject knowledge and appropriate resources for each lesson, either through discussion with colleague professionals or personal research. This can be discrete knowledge and would benefit from broader understanding of how the discrete fits into the holistic model of learning for the children, thus allowing some deeper interrogation of in-lesson outcomes.

The following diagram seeks to describe the dynamics being explored from visits during second experiences. The trainees are at a transition point, where they are moving from absorbing structural knowledge, linked with discrete subject knowledge, to being able to embed these as procedural and interactive understandings within an active classroom environment; ie timely decision making.

In the second experience, standards 8 professionalism, 7 behaviour management, 1 expectations, 4 planning (order and organisation) and 3 subject knowledge, are generally secure, across all the trainees, as they are personal attributes that are enhanced with experience and application of personal capabilities.

There is some variation in standard 7, within classes where specific behaviour issues required individualised responses, which the class teachers acknowledged were significant.

Although teaching standards 2, 5 and 6 can therefore be argued as less secure, it is perhaps important to reflect why this is the case, as they appear across all types of trainee going in a second experience. It was interesting to discuss this issue with mentors during a training session and to ask them to consider where they would feel less secure if they were parachuted into a different school and key stage.

With standard 2 being progress and outcomes, the trainees are at a disadvantage in going into their second school, as they just don’t know the children in that class. Neither will they have a detailed understanding of children of that age group, so may not have mental “baselines” from which to extract appropriate learning expectations.

Standards 6&5; Learning to develop tasks for a new age range is challenging in itself, to match and challenge appropriately over time. In the absence of good subject knowledge that embeds an understanding of how the subject develops, lessons can become activities that may or may not lead to secure learning and, in addition, appropriate interventions may be missed. The ability to think on their feet and adjust a task demand to evident needs of the learners might be compromised. Assessment can be further undermined, as each school is seeking to develop their own internal systems in the absence of national descriptors. The meeting with mentors showed that there were seven systems within nine mentors, including four variations of the local County system.

The early meeting with the teacher mentors leading the second experience enabled discussion of issues that arose in earlier cohorts, seeking to pre-empt some of the issues that might simply be a constituent part of the second experience.

As a result, these areas were a focus for mentor-trainee discussion.

Trainees are charged with monitoring progress and interventions over their experience. They have to unpick the detail of learning from interactions and outcomes to understand ideas behind progress. Some of this is captured in personal case studies.

Trainee reflection time. With the inevitable pressures of routes such as School Direct, built in (collaborative peer) reflection/ weekly review time would seem a necessary element to consider, when reviewing the holistic experience. Time to sit, to think and to have professional development discussions needs to be built into all school experiences. The mentor role is key to this.

In Primary terms, the breadth of teaching standard 2, as progress and outcomes, covering year 1 to year 6, is one that would repay some developmental thought, to create exemplar material that demonstrates the development from EYFS (year 1) to year 6, within the current curriculum, especially in English and Maths. This reference material would support developing judgement. If it was extended with examples from other curriculum areas, this could raise appropriate expectations.

To exemplify TS2 further, regular moderation activities between the trainee and the class teacher could result in a personal reflective portfolio unpicking progress in different subjects, but also introduce the trainees to the need for regular evaluation to inform teaching practice.

In the main, trainees will be on track to achieve at a good or better level at the end of their training year. If they’re not, they will be subject to detailed concerns having been raised.
All trainees would benefit from focused reflection time looking at the 24652 dynamic, working to fine tune their approaches, developing personalisation to evident needs, including SEND. This is a clear action on the mentors during weekly review meetings.

When considering needs in returning to their substantive experience: -
Get to know the progress made by the children in their absence, then…
·         to develop (with support) their own medium term plans,
·         to unpick the detail of learning from outline intention through their own actions,
·         understanding subject development over time,
·         creating challenging tasks appropriate to the children’s needs,
·         interacting with learning giving appropriate supportive feedback and guidance,
·         making rational decisions based on outcome,
·         interacting with anomalies
·         and evaluating outcomes.

In other words, refining, or recalibrating themselves as whole class teachers, taking ever greater responsibility for progress, preparing to consider the needs of different classes in September.

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Talk Your Thinking; photograph Prompts.

15/1/2018

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Photographs as storyboards and memory prompts

Oracy can appear to be a current buzz word. If it means public speaking, then, to me, it represents a small part of actual learning. If it means getting children to talk appropriately about what they are doing, developing their articulacy across a range of needs, I’m all in favour. In effect, this approach would be part of a long tradition in school, of getting children to externalise their thinking. As a classteacher, the tape recorder was well used to record thoughts, stories and discussions. This might be supplemented by paired writing, with one child articulating and the other scribing, with both editing after the first draft. As this was the time of large classes and before TAs, both methods were necessary.

The picture gallery above shows stages in the placement of a septic tank in a very small garden in France. The project required the creation of a 25-cubic metre “sand pit” into which the treated water from the septic tank could seep, to comply with regulations. The digger was a specialist machine, in that the shovel could be reversed to tip the earth over the wall into the waiting lorry. The plastic pipework is all very much hidden, and the earth has regrown into a useable grass area.

Following on from my last blog, looking at images as memory joggers for learning, I want to propose that, for some children, providing them with the essence of an activity will allow them to better articulate their own personal narrative from the activity. In many ways, it is supported report rehearsal for writing.

With digital photography having become a feature of many devices, to capture images through an activity is now so easy that children can do it for themselves; cameras and iPads are features of most classrooms.

While children are working on a task, an any subject, sequential photographs can be used to provide a record of their activity, through to final outcomes. In subjects such as PE, art, DT, science, outdoor activities of all kinds, image capture during activity can become memory prompts, which, for some children who might struggle with capturing their thoughts in writing after the activity, to have prompts which enable them to structure their articulation, ahead of writing, could be the difference between achievement and non-achievement. The photographic gallery is a scaffold, which can be supported by questioning to ascertain greater detail.

Where this approach became a more common feature of classroom life, children can use any activity as a stimulus for talk and writing. Rather than set up activity that becomes a stimulus for writing instructions; a common one is making a cup of tea, a slice of toast or perhaps a sandwich, why not ask children to create instructions for playing a sport, how to make a piece of 3D art, collage, clay, or perhaps how to get from one place in the school to another? Capture what they have been involved in, rather than setting up dissociated activities.

If the picture prompts are put out vertically, down the side of the page, they can be used to then create from one sentence to a short paragraph against each picture. If they can start with one sentence, they might be persuaded to try for a second, and so on…

Earlier, I wrote about using tape recorders. The iPad can be used as a voice capture machine, with the child or a TA acting as scribe afterwards, perhaps creating personal reading books for reluctant readers, to read their own stories.

From experience, the approach above woks extremely well with the two-page approach to writing, acting as the preliminary scaffold for a first draft, supported with word lists, simple dictionaries and personal focus SPaG rules.

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Memories and Dual Coding

11/1/2018

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“How do your know?”

I’ve been rustling (digitally) through some photographs from the summer holidays, in many ways searching for some inspiration for some painting, but, to me, by far the most common focus is that every photograph brings back a flood of memories; not just the immediacy of the photograph, but the surrounding, or linked experiences and sensations.

I am very conscious that my 1950/60s childhood is much less well documented, in large part because photography was relatively more expensive and much less secure; there was always a chance that the photo wouldn’t come out and required the trek to the chemist to develop the film, with a wait time of at lest a few days. Those black and white photos that exist, however, do draw back memories, distorted through the remainder of my life.

Dual coding seems to be a current buzz word. I have a feeling that it is one of those things that has always been a part of human existence, but, having been identified, has become a thing in itself.

Life is a series of experiences, both formal learning and informal experience.

·         Being part of an experience and engaging in dialogue about the experience is likely to fit with the dual coding remit.
·         To develop some kind of record of the experience, to photograph it, to draw or paint or simply to write down some significant words as aides memoire. An ancient shepherd who kept a knot in a string, or a notch in a piece of wood for every sheep could use one-to-one correspondence to check the flock, even if they couldn’t count.
·         Reference back to these contemporaneous documents, as prompts, coupled with dialogic exploration enables an engaged adult lead to offer further areas for reflection, research or evaluation; creating appropriate links to the original experience.
·         Speaking about the learned experience, using relevant aides memoire, opens the speaker to and audience, which, if allowed to comment or critique, allows the speaker to consider areas that might not have been part of the earlier experience.
·         The read and spoken experiences can be interpreted into appropriate materials that exemplify the experience. an example might be the mathematical material created by Zoltan Dienes, exploring place value and mathematical functions in considerable depth.
·         The combination of the manipulation, the dialogue, the drawing, diagramming, and the interpretation into a number system, all contribute to a multiplicity of links within understanding.
·         In many ways, the notion of “show your working” is very important as it extends the “dialogue” between the learner and the teacher, allowing insights into procedural thinking. This can extend to “talk your thinking”; a child articulating their rationale when undertaking a task.

It is the child version of “know how with show how”, which, to me, is the essence of my understanding of dual coding when working with learners; getting them to externalise what they are thinking, which is the underpinning of assessment/teacher judgements.

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How To Survive in Teaching, a review and Reflection

5/1/2018

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With this book being published on 11th January 2018, Emma Kell has written a very important contribution to the current debate. On a day where we have heard that up to December 2017, applications to teacher training are currently 30% lower than at the same time the previous year, it is incumbent on everyone associated with education to keep as many teachers in post as possible, as well as to create environments where young teachers feel welcome, are nurtured and develop the desire to make teaching their long-term career.

I’ve followed the past couple of years with interest, as, first, Emma developed her ideas for her doctorate, using Twitter to its best advantage as a conduit into discussion and sharing of background thinking through shared blogs. Twitter surveys enabled the development of broader and more focused questions. Emma acknowledges the contribution of many hundreds of colleagues who have spoken honestly about their experiences.

That schools vary, is something that must be admitted, from the start. Even within maybe ten miles radius of any particular house, in any city, it’s possible to find schools where recruitment is never an issue, whereas others will struggle to have any applicants for their vacancies. This latter experience inevitably creates immediate pressures on the internal operation of the school, with associated movement on staff in-year to cover needs, whereas the more comfortably placed school can continue its development journey, with the newbie having a mentor to support their settling period. The developmental experiences of young teachers, in a profession that is becoming ever younger, is, to me, one of the main areas that should be considered. In an ever-fragmented system, LA, MAT, Free Schools etc, continuous personal development can become a casualty, to be replaced by personal development, often through Teachmeets or Saturday conferences, and there are a lot of those about.

Teaching is a thinking person’s job. It can easily become a 24 hour a day, even in less-pressured environments. I have often perceived teaching as a three-dimensional puzzle, the linear dimension of teaching each day, with the third dimension of the multiple needs of children, in Primary, across multiple subjects. The ever-present demands of progress data, across every child and every need, the search for minutiae, has, for many, diverted necessary time for thinking to secretarial recording tasks. This can be exacerbated in challenging schools who have a permanent need to keep showing progress. Teacher judgement, such as drove the education reporting system until the 1990s, where parents were happy if little x was doing well, has been replaced by multicoloured tracking data, with small data shifts seeming to indicate security or insecurity. As if we can ever really know with absolute accuracy exactly where any child is at any particular point in time.

Teaching is a thinking person’s job, yet successive Governments since 1987 have sought to take greater control over every teacher’s thinking, with, to me, the greatest pressure being exerted from 1997 and “deliverology”, National Strategies and pedagogical dictat. Coming to terms with expected changes, while simultaneously teaching that which is about to be superseded demands additional thinking and reflection time. It’s no wonder that, when the curriculum changes, personnel leave, rather than go through more adjustment. Change is also why a number decide to go part time, simply to be able to do the best job they can and “buying” a day to think is their only way to life balance.

Teaching is physically and mentally demanding; at its simplest responding to the needs of an interactive audience of thirty (plus) children every hour for around six hours each day, exciting and enthusing them to actively participate in the thinking journeys of several subject areas, interacting, directing and investigating personal needs, feeding back, summarising and preparing for “next time”. For Secondary, it can be a different audience every hour. Beyond these contact hours, there is a need to think and plan, to interact with lesson outcomes, to follow up in-lesson concerns with in-depth investigation, possibly discussions with colleagues, telephoning parents or outside specialists. Is it any surprise that some teachers can’t really switch off?

So, to safeguard their team, heads and senior managers have to be “super-thinkers”, working at the system level, sorting out the working of the school so that teachers can get on with the day job, making sure that staffing and resources are as good as they can be; I recognise in a period of falling budgets, that this may become more difficult, but it’s still a management issue. Timetabling of meetings and other extra demands, such as parent evenings, concerts which show the broader school, need to be carefully organised; cancel staff meetings in parent evening week. Have clear agenda subject development focus meetings, so that they can be fully prepared, and give the presenter some time to think; a half day of thinking and planning at £80 supply for a staff meeting of 20 people works out at £4 a head, very reasonable CPD. Sharing internal expertise is a very good start point. SLT also have to learn to say “thank you”, in timely manner. Internal (team) etiquette can be the difference between staff staying or moving.

Emma Kell covers these issues and many more, with detailed example from the “chalk face”. There are a number of suggestions at the end of the book that seek to address needs. In many ways, by far the simplest approach would be to “love the one’s you’re with”, “let’s talk” and “we can work it out”.

A team of teachers, super-thinkers, working together, can bring each up to the level of the best, address problems and can come up with solutions to problems that affect them locally, working within contextual and locality resources to provide a quality product of which they can be proud. Pride in what you are doing is a very powerful personal boost.

Emma has harnessed, through social media and networking, the potential of such a super-thinkers team and has come up with some possible solutions to current issue. Some will need money, most will require modest alteration to practice, enabling classroom teachers to recover their role as front-line thinkers.

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Evidence of Impact? Rational thinking...

As easy as ABC; developing a topic Glossary

Mentors 24652

Talk Your Thinking; photograph Prompts.

Memories and Dual Coding

How To Survive in Teaching, a review and Reflection

Chris Chivers

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