For some time, I have worried that we have been in danger of over-scientising, or over-systematising teaching. There is a case that neuroscience has added to our understanding and that has to be for the best, but, in many ways, teaching has not altered since I first walked into a classroom in 1971, but as each generation comes to the role, they offer new vocabulary for older constructs. Relabelling doesn’t alter the essentials of the job.

It is essentially thinking and analysing available information, planning for progression in learning, presenting appropriately challenging information and learning opportunities, thinking during and between lessons, adapting to evident needs, recording those bits and pieces that are worthy of record, as aides memoire.

Of course, around these central elements lie further lists of sub-tasks, any of which can be grown, through over-systematising, into over-demanding activities, just to double-check the system.
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The essence is analyse, plan, do review, record. Each step is a thinking step… and anything that detracts from that is to the detriment of the children’s learning.

When you walk into a classroom and wait for your class to arrive, you have compiled some thoughts ahead of time. You may have had some oral or written records from a preceding teacher, together with any other important information or data about their prior performance.

You’ll have organise the classroom to provide the most efficient arrangement of tables, that enables ease of movement, as well as good sight lines from different areas of the classroom. You will have ordered and organised resources; some at each table and more in labelled drawers for easy access and return. Reading corners, maths equipment, display boards or working walls will be evident. Much more besides will have been labelled or arranged in a display.

In addition, you will have considered the curriculum organisation for the period of time that you are responsible for the class, with a specific focus on those areas that will form the initial topics in each subject. The best planning is longer term to focus on the interaction of knowledge and skills as they develop and are reuse during the year. Being ordered and organised is the hallmark of good teaching.

The sharing of information has always been a central feature of good teaching. The quality of information sharing can be a variable, in that all information exists in a narrative that draws from the children’s prior experience, sifting and adding the new information after challenge or reflection.

If you need to collate the relevant information to be shared, that seems like an excellent idea, but the narrative sharing abilities of the teacher, the security and depth of the information, together with the articulacy of the adult will determine whether imagery is conjured in the minds of the receivers. If images are shared, that support the narrative, children can utilise recall or perhaps indulge in abstraction to further their own imagination.

Classroom vocabulary is closely connected with contextual experiences; if children’s home experiences are limited, this will have an impact on their understanding, compounded if the linguistic experience is also limited. Teaching and learning rely on words, embedding worldly concepts. The teacher is the generator of words, through the breadth and depth of experiences that they offer, inside and outside the classroom. Words, in some form, are needed to be able to interact with the world.

The interactions between teacher, other adult or children are key. Quality of questions, responses to their answers, follow-up questions for clarification, providing feedback in timely fashion, subtle adjustments or specific coaching and modelling might be needed in some cases.

Pitch of challenge, interaction and feedback are the equivalent of tailoring; a piece of clothing might be approximately the right size, but for individuals might require taking in or loosening, depending on how it is perceived to fit.

Teacher standards 6&5 describe these detailed actions, within the 24652 continuum; know your children, plan efficiently, interact and adjust to need, make decisions about subsequent learning. If planning was broader, over a longer timescale, with teachers making notes on next needs, it might decrease some anxiety about workload. Much planning is, in effect, continuous, with additional information added to need.

• Standards 6 and 5 are the key to getting closer to individual, group and class needs. The judgemental aspects of standard 6, between and within lessons, are effected through adaptations between lessons or within a lesson. That nuance can be lost in a delivery model. It is often evident in ITE trainees, who are focused on getting through the lesson more than the actual learning and getting to know the needs of individuals.
• Assessment, to my mind, has always meant knowing your children. It also means knowing the generic progression in each of the subjects that make up the Primary curriculum. Marrying the two together is the essence of good planning that embeds appropriate challenge for different needs.
• Planning is, at heart, a(n) hypothesis, a general descriptor of what will happen if all your prior judgements have been accurate.
• All plans should be subject to adjustment within the lesson, if, on the balance of evidence and the teacher judgement, individuals, groups or the whole class seem to be finding aspects harder or easier than expected. In-lesson interactions and oral and written feedback are likely to be influenced by these judgements.
• Teacher Standards 6&5 together effectively mean spot and deal with learning issues in a lesson.
• Reflection after the lesson, or period of lessons allows for future plans to be adjusted to outcomes. This could be in the form of “interleaving” or adjusting future demands to cater for known needs.

Every teacher is adrift with a boat load of children. They deserve good maps and the ability to captain their own ships with certainty. They carry a valuable cargo, who should be enjoying time to look around and take in the experiences as they pass, rather than being kept too busy to look, or only allowed to see the world through a small port hole.

The teacher, as a good captain, should also be looking out for the well-being of her team.
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It’s not simple, it never has been simple and, given the complex nature of any group of humans, will never be a simple role; but it is still a great job and you get to be captain…!

Challenge, as a central concept, has been a part of my whole teaching career.

This was linked to knowing your stuff and being aware of children’s learning needs, with match and challenge, aka pitch, being the precursor of differentiation.

​In many ways, problems started, for some, when differentiation became a thing to do, resulting in a more activities-led approach, rather than the earlier more analytical approach. It embedded, in some practice, the need for different activities for different groups, creating an appearance of catering for different needs when there might be too little or too much challenge. The ease of downloading activities from the internet and easy reprographics aided and abetted this approach.

There are different layers of challenge, starting with the curriculum, where concepts might be simply introduced in one year-group, added to in subsequent years; a progressive building of knowledge. It does require, though, from the teacher, an awareness of previous learning, to be able to make appropriate links that enable recall to underpin the new information.
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Challenge will be embedded in the introductory part of the lesson, where information is shared directly, orally, supplemented by visual or other means, aka dual coding, building a coherent narrative, developed further through careful question and answer to fine tune responses and ensure security. The extended vocabulary, exploring new concepts, must be linked to earlier understanding and linked vocabulary; it cannot be assumed that each child will make the links without them being made explicit; modelled retrieval practice, within and between lessons.
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One of the significant pleasures in my work life in being enabled to unpick how a school works, is that the schools are invariably open and honest with me and are seeking the external view that might nudge them forward in their development. As each school is subtly different, that can mean that interrogation has to look in fine detail at different elements, to determine how they link and possibly how they either support or hinder aspects of growth.

I am also very visual in the way that I think about systems. I have to have the bigger picture, so that I can explore the constituent parts. Schools, after all, are systems, of interlocking systems, with the key one being the system that operates around each learner, so that they are enabled to make the best progress at that point in time. This also allows for those individuals for whom expectations of the whole group may not be applicable, as a result of issues specific to them. As teachers, we have to accept that life does affect learning patterns. It does for adults, so it does for learners and they are young, so may not yet have built their coping mechanisms.

There are many elements which go together to make up the complex event that we call learning.

Some commentators argue that you can’t “see” learning in a lesson, and yes, perhaps that, as a phenomenon is not easily visible, but, I think it is feasible to explore the learning intentions of the lesson and to qualitatively explore the learning environment, the experiences, the challenge and effort being demanded, so that it is possible to determine the likelihood of whether learning might be taking place at that point.

Knowing where the learners are at the beginning of the discrete series of experiences they will encounter though a series of lessons is essential, so that they will then be taken on a journey alongside the teacher, rather than the teacher running ahead and learners lagging behind in a long tail. Knowing where they are headed is important too. If the “map” is only ever in the teacher’s head, then learners are not aware of the destination, nor can they have an understanding of where they are on the journey. If one was to take a climbing analogy, as I have done in another post, from the base camp, we want to journey to a specific point, or pitch, where we can take stock before moving onto the next one, so that the journey as a whole is always within the learner’s understanding.
Having an understanding of what “getting there” might look like is also an essential element of the learning process. If this is not clear, then effort can be misdirected into other areas, which might have lesser impact on a learner outcome. For some, the journey to each point may need to be broken down further and they may require guidance on the way, so the leader/teacher/TA has to “drop back” to encourage and support. Some might like to “climb/run ahead”. If that is the case then the teacher has to determine whether this can be accomplished safely. They can’t fall off an exercise book, so it is probably very safe, but some teachers do supply limitations. This is the point at which real independence can be developed through appropriately set challenges.

Task Setting (What’s the challenge?)

Limitations can be embedded in the activities that are given to children. I looked at task setting in another post, and it is to this that I’d want to return, as it is, without doubt, the determinant of progress. Real learning, at least to me, requires embedding through use and application of what is known into overcoming a challenge and solving problems. School learning can be based on activities, doing, following a set of instructions, which can be seen as modelling or scaffolding, more rarely applying knowledge and skills to challenging scenarios. This “recipe” approach to teaching can be effective in the right hands, as can all approaches, however in the wrong hands it can embed a limitation, created by the task. A level x task, given to a level x learner, will produce level x learning. Task choice and challenge is therefore an essential skill.

Unpicking the level of challenge, the need for learners to think, to plan, to organise, to select, to determine routes and ideas rather than just follow instructions, is an important aspect. Completing an activity sheet does not necessarily equate to learning. End to end activity sheets does not mean a scheme of work or a curriculum.

The process of learning has to be a dynamic interplay between the learner and the context, making active links between what is already known and what is being laid before them. To that end the interplay of the formal lessons, homework and time between lessons would also appear, to me, to be critical. How much homework is an unrelated activity, just because homework has to be given? What if the challenge was continuous, so that homework became pre-thinking, preparation for the lesson, or a reflection on the learning outcomes of the current one?

Boxing everything would appear to embed potential limitations, in inexperienced hands, but sometimes in more experienced hands, as a result of the system. From that point of view, the diagram at the header is limited as it implies boxes rather than a dynamic.

Knowledge and Skills

Learners need to know things in order to understand the world around them. Knowledge underpins all thinking, but the awakening by teaching or discovery through experience of new knowledge has to be explored in relation to what is already known. Making links is essential.

The knowledge area provides the context for the learning, sometimes in discrete subject areas, sometimes in less discrete manner; the real world of young children does not exist in subject boxes.

 Discrete area allows specific concepts, (current) knowledge and subject specific skills to be explored and developed to hone the skills over time to provide capacity to explore for oneself, at different levels, each of which, I would argue has validity.

One does not have to reach a specific level of expertise before using what is known to explore. As a teenager, I was interested in entomology, not as an expert, but as a way to explore the natural world. It was a specific interest, but linked with GCE and A level studies, allowed deeper insights in a very specific area.

The skills of the subject often provide the thought and practical processes, and it is this area that needs careful consideration, as it is within the process skills, use and application, that reflective practice enables the involved teacher to determine where any gaps occur.

Active Processing- Making Sense of Things

While a teacher might present knowledge in contexts in ways that they think are suitable for the children in their classes, there is never a guarantee that the message gets across to the learner.

The teacher language style, and the vocabulary being used might preclude a learner from picking up the essential information that they need to make progress. Not all learners are active listeners and even those who are can miss parts of information as they reflect on an earlier snippet of knowledge.

Even if the message does get across there is no guarantee that the learner will have the capacity to process the knowledge, in some cases because they do not have prior experiences which allow them to link the new information to an expected position. They already have a deficit, which, if undetected, embeds and deepens the deficit, by adding a further layer of deficit.

And, even if they have the capacity to take the information in and to process it, there are some learners who have difficulty in expressing what they know in ways that are acceptable as outcomes.

The teacher role is to place learning opportunities in front of children, it is also to walk along beside the learners, especially identified vulnerable groups. Engaging and investigating their progressive understanding supports fine tuning of interactions, the feedback, the guidance in a lesson, the alteration of learning expectations and the written feedback.

It is a cyclic event, with each successive outcome creating a new baseline of expectation, based on learning outcomes.

So to simplify the diagram at the header of this post.

• Teaching and Learning is a series of interlocking expectations over time; long, medium and short term.
• Analysis underpins the detail of planning, which in turn describes what will happen in the lesson, during and after which the reflective teacher adjusts expectations to evident outcomes, with appropriate records kept as aides memoire.
• Tasks set embed the expectations of the learning, which should be challenging to thinking rather than activity based.
• The product, the outcome and the process are important, with the latter capable of investigation to discover the aspects which a child finds difficult, receptive, processing or expressive difficulty. The former can be compared to aspirational outcomes and investigated for future learning steps.
• You don’t really know what they know unless they can communicate it to you and there are many routes to communication. It’s not just spoken or written.

Is it good enough?

That is for the teacher and the learner to determine. If exemplars are shared, they can be discussed against the learner outcome, with a descriptor of next steps shared. Once shared, they become a common expectation, for the learner focus. Showing progress can be good enough for an individual. If there is a “bottom line” expectation, this can be explored with learners to establish the personalised route necessary to achieve this. Specific support and guidance may be needed.

Target setting.

This might suffer from being an adult concept, especially for younger learners. Perhaps it would be more useful to talk in terms of what learners are trying to get better at.

Current target setting is also often a hidden agenda, with targets stuck inside book covers, in another booklet, or in a teacher’s planner. It also suffers in some places from lacking a dynamic; three targets set for a half term review. If not achieved, then reset. It sucks the life out of learners putting effort into their learning.

An alternative approach is to

• Put personalised targets on a fold out slip, at the edge of the exercise book, so that during the lesson, the child and the teacher can be aware of the specific targets.
• This can prompt conversations specific to that child, support the learner’s self-evaluations and also support teacher oral and written feedback, as the slips can be folded out during marking.
• Targets can be achieved , then become non-negotiable in future work, with new ones added.
• This approach also supports record keeping, as the slip forms an on-going record of achievement.

And so the cycle starts again, new tailored challenges, regular, purposeful engagement, reflection, adjustment, feedback, reflection and improvement, ad infinitum.

We are all, or should be, life-long learners, more often without a teacher. Life offers challenges. We need to create solution finders.
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A rule of thumb when considering teaching plans…
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Know your children well (baseline). Challenge them appropriately. Engage in the journey; support and guide as necessary. Explore and Improve outcomes. Outcomes become new baseline. Repeat.
 
It is always interesting talking with student teachers, because, by definition, they are still learning; they are students in Initial Teacher Education. Trying to unpick different elements that go to make up good teaching can give rise to interesting side issues, not least seeking synonyms for different aspects of the role. The two most common to seek alternatives are differentiation and assessment.

I quite like to start with simpler models then build onto that framework of understanding. When I was training, I had a friend whose first port of call for any topic was the Ladybird series, where there was easily available a rapid introduction to a subject, so these books provided the sub-headings to be filled in with detail later.

It is very important for trainee (and qualified) teachers to develop a holistic awareness and knowledge of the needs of the full range of children with whom they will work, so that, when faced with a particular year-group, their attainment can be seen in context and provide the basis for planning.
Knowing the children in their classes holistically, as described in the diagram above, supports decision making. Visualising education in the round and being aware of the children’s backgrounds can enable the teacher to underpin areas where the prior, background experience may become a limiting factor.

My own model of what teaching is can be described as a cycle; analyse, plan, do, review, record, or, even more simply, as in the nutshell below.
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Knowing your children well, as a start point can be the greatest confusion for a teacher, as the records passing with the child may be incomplete or confusing, or simply based on data. In an era without a common assessment language between schools, this could become a significant issue at transfer, if not within transition, as teacher judgement is embedded in assessment information.

The range of children within a class can vary significantly, but, even within selected classes, such as streams and sets, there is a range to be accommodated, with both subject knowledge and skill needs to be addressed. Knowing the different needs of the children ensures that challenge within tasking can be tailored to their needs, with the need to articulate challenge being greater than the need to show different activities, which can be the fall-back position.

It is, in reality, the need to see children challenged within a lesson that an observer wishes to see. What have the children got to get their teeth into, to think about, to talk about and then to write about? That this will be different for different children seems to me to be self-evident, but then, I taught before the initial National Curriculum, quite often in an Integrated Day, group-based approach, which was then a feature of Primary practice. Group-based tasking was normal.

So, the first word that needs to be evident in the classroom is challenge and how this is manifest and visible across the range of abilities. It can be embedded in personal challenge or learning targets, which can be the main focus within a broader tasking.
Improvement is the second word that needs to be in common use in the class. If the challenge is correct, then there will be an outcome. Whatever the outcome, it should be capable of improvement, so sharing this with the group or class through the available technology should enable the children to talk through how they would seek to add even greater value to the shared outcomes.

The use of display, as in WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) walls can be a valuable asset to discussing improvement. It is a case of constantly putting quality in front of children, so that they can build a visual image of expectation and take some charge of their own efforts.

Every outcome should become a new baseline if the process of challenge and improving outcomes is embedded in classroom practice. Each successive outcome becomes a descriptor of progression.

Of course the issue then is how to describe progress across a subject, so that there is a framework against which to make the judgement. The question is; how far have they travelled and where next? And so we go round the houses, especially without clear frames of reference. It might be better to consider security of learning, with successive descriptors of capacity supporting this thinking.
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​Tasks (should) embed a wide range of challenges for learners, including: - 

• Some will be investigative, some problem-solving, some using and applying what is known into new areas. All should be challenging to thinking and have an impact on learner progress. The context for a practice task needs to be considered carefully.
• There will be the intellectual challenge; do they understand the task and the nature of the challenge? Can they perceive the strategies that they will need to fulfil the task?  Some of this will be determined by the teacher explanation of the task criteria, and what needs to be done to be successful, ie the success criteria, or what the teacher will be looking for.
• For some there will be the social challenge, such as the ability to cooperate with others in sharing available resources, organising, or being organised by, others.
• Some tasks will challenge independence. This, for the adults, is sometimes a difficult judgement call. Some tasks will need direct adult support, supervision and guidance to be successful. The amount and the detail of the adult support needs to be considered when reflecting on outcomes. What could the learners do for themselves?

​Some tasks will challenge learners to take what they know, to address the challenge with that baseline understanding, then to tackle new issues, identifying what they now need to know in order to make progress in the task.

For interest these are tasks, extracted from work planning diaries that I have used with young children.

Set up a fair test to find the best colour to wear when walking along the road.

Design and make a device that will project a ping pong ball 4 metres into a container.  

Using newspaper, build a framework strong enough to… hold a 100g mass 50cm above a table.. hold a cup of water… hold a cream egg… span a 50cm gap between tables and hold 100/200/500g

Consider how to find out of a full balloon weighs more than an empty one.

How much stretch does an elastic band have?

Using squared paper, always the same size, fold a series of rafts with different area bases and different height sides. Which design holds the greater mass?

Other ideas are embedded in subject related blogs.

Emotive, often to an almost explosive degree, exclusion is a word that, unlike marmite, which can be a case of like or dislike, brings forth bile from different standpoints, aimed at people who may hold contrary positions. The extremes of any behaviour-related decisions are likely never to agree.

For what it’s worth, I think schools should have the option to exclude a child, for example to safeguard the others physically or mentally, from violence or bullying. But, I would expect there to be records of intervention or of general school approaches that ensure that civic expectations are articulated, carried through, or lived in daily life through the adult models.

Where, in a former existence, I visited schools to look at their inclusion approaches, those operating in very challenging environments had multiple layers of intervention, should that be necessary, enabling either staff or children to support self-regulation, or to seek to stabilise an individual when situations became untenable. At the extreme, and despite their best efforts, these schools held to the option of exclusion.

In an even earlier existence, as a headteacher for sixteen years, I excluded two children during that time.

I wrote about the school behaviour policy in an earlier blog, but, to simplify, as a Primary school, we had three principles, based on responsibility for self, behaviour towards others and towards our environment. These were enhanced by the adoption of the Hampshire Constabulary “Five Golden Rules”. The essence of these complementary approaches allowed stories from wide sources in assembles, exploration of narratives in class from class books, PSHE, or P4C. They also supported restorative discussions when children, inevitably, fell out.

One of the exclusions resulted in a “fair cop” approach by the parent, with relatively easy restoration.

The other resulted in a file that will stay in my loft for a further five years, even though I am technically retired. In many ways, it should have been another easy restoration, but one of the parents decided to appeal to the Governors, which resulted in a hearing, finding for my decision. That resulted in an appeal to the local area education officer, again finding in my favour, followed by a County investigation, by which time the child had moved school and been excluded, resulting in the head having a Governor review, which found in their favour… you know the rest.

In the meantime, my email inbox was full of regular missives with invective that I have rarely heard, even during a rugby and other sport earlier life, but which I printed on a “just in case” basis.

It was the call from the Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCFS), one of the incarnations of the current DoE, that became worrying, as they were then investigating a complaint against the County. A senior official would be visiting to investigate the original situation, to seek to understand the background and the dynamics of the situation. The multiple-page report found in favour of the County and all associated. We waited for any subsequent escalation of the appeals process, perhaps to some form of judicial review.

The several months that this process took were distracting, demoralising and destabilising for many people, throughout the County. Keeping one’s mind on the day job required significant focus. It often reminded me of the truism, that headship can be a very lonely job; there were things I couldn’t share, with anyone.

Exclusion is never to be taken lightly.

The ripples affect many people in many ways, and, in extreme cases, for many years. My thoughts go out to any head facing complex situations.

In addition, there was a two week “getting to know” topic planned for September, totally in the teacher control, to re-establish working habits; see planning blog. There was also a school-wide expectation on the use of the workbooks; example (click for blog)
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For many years, there have been studies that showed between year expectations may be different, sometimes significantly so, with inter-school transition having the greatest drop. I spoke about this at Beyond Levels #LearningFirst Bath.

​Teacher standard 2 is progress and outcomes. In September, in any year, a blank book does not provide a baseline, so a child can seek to depress a teacher expectation, should they be so minded. There is a “truism” that there is a drop off in achievement during the summer holiday. This approach tests that assumption.

To have previous examples provides a simple baseline expectation that may not be provided by written or oral reports. At it’s simplest, it can be as easy as having one piece of work stuck into the workbook as an aide memoire, but, to have extended examples could provide a greater reference point, for both teacher and child, enabling early interventions (TS6&5) to seek to regain earlier achievement levels.
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It supports teacher decision-making, but also saves money on books… what's not to like?

​Everyone is capable of teaching another, especially in an area where one has an expertise that can be shared with the other. This could be a specific area such as carpentry or pottery, or a much broader entity that constitutes a professional qualification.

Mentoring, on the other hand, can be more challenging, as it may need to be built into a longer-term enterprise. Businesses of all kinds provide line management arrangements, where a senior oversees the work of several juniors. It is the working of this relationship that determines whether it is mentoring and developmental or judgemental and purely target driven.

Both approaches exist, but, I would want to argue that the mentoring, developmental approach, supported by clearly articulated goals, has the capacity to significantly enhance an organisation, where more simplistic judgements may diminish.

For a number of years, as a Linked Tutor for two universities and as tutor and quality assurance with a Teaching School, I have taken a number of roles in developing mentors, from initial familiarisation with the role, to overseeing mentor development throughout the training year.

As a relative outsider, I have an interesting role within any particular school; bringing some expertise to share, which will then be enacted through the lens of the mentoring teacher and colleagues, within the context of class specifics and school resources. Anyone who’s been in teaching for any length of time will know that there is a need to adapt to changing circumstances. This, in itself, can be challenging for a new entrant, who may well need to be supported in this regard, especially if they have come from environments where they have been “in control” of their in-tray.

As a personal preference, I would wish to see any school taking trainees, from any provider, considering themselves as mentoring (training) schools, and I have, on occasion, trained a whole staff, particularly where they are entering a training partnership for the first time. In this way, everyone becomes a part of a mentoring team, sharing responsibilities and responding appropriately to requests from trainees for advice or information. It also helps to create a self-help, collegiate environment; the mentor does not then have to be a member of management.

Where the classteacher is the mentor, able to offer informal as well as more formal development commentaries, I use the idea of the “parrot on the shoulder” as an aide memoire. In other words it’s ok for a mentor to advise a course of action during a lesson, to embed specific skills in timely fashion. A debrief after the event is much less effective, as it may rely on remembering specific points in the lesson.

Over the past few years, the role of the mentor has really come to the fore and, in keeping with this, I argued for greater formalisation of the mentor training being offered within the Teaching School and was asked to develop a series of meetings that would be held in school time, with different school hosts, to consider the dynamics of the training year and to pre-empt the needs for the following six to eight weeks.

We start at 1.30pm, to allow for time to eat as well as travel to the venue.

All mentors and trainees come together in July, before the training year, to have time to converse, to consider the initial paperwork needs and familiarise themselves with the course demands, including the mentor and teacher standards.
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It is helpful if annual diaries are planned with overview aims, so that all parties are aware of course demands as well as school requirements.

Picture; the seventh wave, by Bobbie Bale.

Assessment is a part of the process…

In the first part of an exploration of the visual world, I looked at the potential for the external world to become the stimulus for a great deal of learning, including developing the broadest possible vocabulary to support dialogue.

If children are not developing a broad vocabulary, then we may have to look at the adult models interacting with them and the experiences that they encounter in their school and home lives. This is not a new issue. When I started my teacher training in 1971, studies from Bristol were being used as baselines for our discussions. Harold Rosen had written about Language Across the Curriculum and Jerome Bruner was talking about the link between experience, language and thought, among many others.

The world is full of things to look at, to describe, to explore, to measure, to speculate about, to evaluate, or to just name, with closer examination showing ever greater detail that fleshes out the general experience. There is no shortage of possibilities; a series of blogs on a sense of place is linked below.

Through learning experiences, the adults act in a variety of roles, more often sharing essential information/knowledge, at other times acting as coach, engaging in developmental dialogue with learners, as individuals, small groups or whole classes. Currently, some commentators are promoting this as the work of Rosenshine, principles of direct instruction, but I see this structure as a common theme throughout my teaching career. It’s a thinking process. The organisation of a teaching space and the tasking of children can vary, but the structured information sharing, challenge and interactions with learners is the same.
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Having imparted knowledge, the teacher role is to seek to firmly embed this into the learner repertoire and to check the security of understanding; modern promotion of this idea, propounded as Cognitive Load Theory. This is likely to happen during challenges or tasks that follow the instruction. Interactions are based on a teacher awareness of the learners, spotting behaviours, listening to discussion or answers to questions that suggest insecurity or perhaps significant security, either response requiring intervention and potential adjustment to the task parameters.

I’d like to summarise the two elements as 1) knowing your subject(s), with Primary teachers teaching several, and 2) being able to make a judgement where children are, at any point, to support subsequent teaching decisions. I have also to accept that there may be elements of bias in every judgement. This is a potentially significant point, but, with discussion and moderation, elements of bias can be ameliorated, if not eliminated. Interactions are the life-blood of teaching. Tests may occasionally be needed to triangulate reflection.

Subject development can be evidenced through engaging with children of different ages, either directly or through outcome sharing, perhaps through internal moderation, to determine what constitutes quality outcomes at any particular point in learning. Over- and under-expectation will result in distorted challenge, learning opportunities and potentially subsequent decision making. Collecting and collating a portfolio of outcomes is a useful discussion resource. Discussion is a form of collegiate CPD; talking process and outcomes.

We talk of formative and summative assessment; the former being responsive adult behaviour, interacting in real time with learners, the latter is any point where a teacher “takes stock”, informally between lessons and more formally in reporting, orally or in writing to any audience, becoming formative in determining courses of action over a timescale, especially where learning is an issue.

Building evaluation into lessons, through determined intervention supported by available models and enlarged through technology such as a visualiser, enables a teacher to establish clear expectations throughout a lesson and show what achievement can look like. If children are also allowed to talk about their approaches to the tasks in hand, they provide a second level modelling for their peers, and may well use linguistic styles that are understandable to children who may still be struggling.

There has always been a problem of how to remember the learning needs of a class, or classes of children. Regular readers of this blog will know that I advocate fold-out aides-memoire cards that flip out from the edge of an exercise book, enabling the teacher or learner to record items that need to be considered in any piece of work. How to use an exercise book as a personal organiser can be seen here.

https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/a-sense-of-place-locality
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/a-sense-of-place-1
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/creating-nature-detectives
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/a-sense-of-place-naming-things
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/maths-making-sense-of-the-real-world
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Images from a visit to Barbara Hepworth's studio in St Ives

As an adult, it is possible, if time can be made, to become absorbed by an interesting activity, with significant amounts of time, thought and activity devoted to what to others might seem to be isolated tasks, but which demand your full attention.

Two of my friends have hobbies where they can almost seem to lose themselves in the process of creating the best possible photograph, or the best possible painting. In both cases, the absorption is in decision making, working their way through subtle changes, seeking clarity in image, or the best placing of the next colour stroke. Absorption could, of course imply obsession, but, in both people, their interest in the broader world is what provides the stimulus for their focused behaviours, from which they capture images that express an aspect of them.

In both cases the process is key, leading to several iterations of a possible outcome through a process of evaluation and editing; these might be separate pieces, or might be a reworking of the available image. Both are adding depth, through adding to, or removing layers from, the original.

Over the recent past, in education, process has been pushed into the background, yet, at heart, it equates to the models above, by effectively being a progressive layering of information and opportunity that evolves into a personal iteration at a particular age. If one was to see teachers as artisans, working with a very specific raw material, then every single child is a work in progress, capable of being helped to make alterations to what they know and how they use and apply their knowledge in novel contexts.
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The common factor between the hobbyist photographer and painter and the artisan educator is that they control elements that are seemingly in their control as long as they have mastered techniques. The educator’s raw material, being multi-dimensional, may not always be totally in their control, especially in the early stages, resulting in variance in outcomes. It is, after all, a human system dealing in human frailties.

As a scientist, my interest in art began through that, with early drawings of the beetles that I would find and keep, a la Gerald Durrell. A greater interest in the world of art was squashed in my first year at a boy’s Grammar School, where my naïve drawing was judged very harshly, by a teacher whose assessment method was to line everyone up with their work and move individuals up or down the line, followed by a percentage being given. We weren’t given advice or feedback in any form that would move any of us forward. I suppose it was the assessment of you either “had it or you didn’t”.

Fortunately, a move of school and evening classes accompanying my dad, to be taught by the art teacher at the new school, demonstrated that, with some naïve talent and good coaching, I was able to take art GCE as an additional exam and passed.

An interest in the world is, for me, a prerequisite of teaching, as each teacher is, to some degree, helping children to make some sense of the world in which they live, a large part of the stimulus being visual. As children (hopefully) walk to school with their parents, they are (hopefully) noticing features of the locality that become their landmarks and, internalised, supporting their awareness of their place in the world; to become geography. The houses that they pass hold insights into their past through their architecture; history. The natural world and seasonal change can highlight biological aspects.

Each area has it’s own vocabulary that encompasses the essential concepts underpinning the subject. Every area of life can contribute to the child’s developing vocabulary, especially if they are aided by an interested adult. My own interest in the natural world was established through walks in the Welsh valleys with my miner uncle, who would point out plants, birds and animals as we walked.

Awareness starts by registering what is around. Things are just there and can become little more than wallpaper, but they might move, revealing an insect, a bird or a small mammal. Delving into water might reveal frogs, toads newts or fish. The child can start the journey of classification, with subdivisions, as names of birds are learned. Very early scientists would have linked their observations with drawings; some were exceptionally talented at both.

Learning to mark-make is a process, of hand control and an awareness of and careful use of a variety of media. The marks start off as ill-defined, but gradually, for most children, become more controlled, as their hands gain strength, but also allow for light movement and well as heavy marking. Any new medium requires a period of assimilation through what could be called “play”, early accommodation to the flexibility or drying speed of paint, or the difference in elasticity and malleability of plasticine compared with clay.

In 1986, a book arrived on my desk, written by the Hampshire Art Adviser, Lorna Delaney; Guidelines for Art Education. This book provided evidence of the developmental process in children’s art from early years to A level, with examples taken from different stages. A follow-up book arrived in 1992; Further Guidelines for Art Education, this time edited by Mary Schley, the County Inspector for Art. The second book added to the first by looking at assessment as the means by which the process of development could be enhanced. The two books together were useful for both expert artists and also those less confident with the subject.

The whole was premised on an underlying process, with three elements;
·         The conceptual element concerned with ideas, perceptions, feelings, impulses and responses
·         The operational element concerned with the control and use of techniques, materials and media
·         The synthetic element concerned with the perception of the dynamics of visual language, line, tone, colour, texture, movement, structure and form.

Each of the elements has a classificatory language that requires unpicking, sharing, demonstration, discussing, evaluation as well as hands-on opportunity.
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Art enables everyday visuals to be captured, interpreted, enhanced or even distorted, depending on the age and maturity of the child.

In many ways, for the whole of my career in education, there have been two main elements; the information giving curriculum and what I have always seen as the challenge curriculum. Some will see this as knowledge and skills, but, in the reality of the world, unless what you know can be used and applied in contexts where it is applicable or can be adapted to need, the acquisition of knowledge for it’s own sake, while laudable, could also become slightly debilitating.
It can be summed up as something to think about, to talk about and to show in an appropriate form.

Sharing knowledge is the bread and butter of every subject area. It requires planning over different timescale, allocated to different year groups and clearly identifying, so that it is progressive building, rather than an ad-hoc hiccupping.

With different age children, there will be some accommodation to the needs of the children, in terms of vocabulary and phrasing, but the essence of the sharing is to impart information that is essential and desirable in order that the children can then tackle pre-planned tasks. The sharing might have required a variety of modelling techniques, beyond the teacher voice; manipulable materials, visuals, as video or drawn elements or sound, music or other relevant material. This is often called dual coding.

Hopefully, this input is the stimulus for many of the learners to start to think independently for themselves, to generate their own questions and, given time to discuss with their peers, to assimilate the information more firmly. Learner feedback after the sharing of information is the key to teacher decision making; move on or revisit?

Task Setting (What’s the challenge?)

Limitations can be embedded in the activities that are given to children. In earlier posts, I’ve looked at task setting and it is to this that I’d want to return, as it is, without doubt, the determinant of progress. Real learning, at least to me, requires embedding what is known into overcoming a challenge and solving problems.

Much school learning can be seen as activities; doing, following a set of instructions, rather than applying knowledge and skills to challenging scenarios. This “recipe” approach to teaching can be effective in the right hands, as can all approaches, particularly where learners may be insecure and it is effectively remodelling in practice, however in the wrong hands it embeds a limitation, created by the task. A level x task, given to a level x learner, will produce level x learning. Task choice and challenge is therefore an essential skill.

Unpicking the level of challenge, the need for learners to think, to plan, to organise, to select, to determine routes and ideas rather than just follow instructions, is an important aspect.

Completing an activity sheet does not necessarily equate to learning. End to end activity sheets do not mean a scheme of work.

The process of learning has to be a dynamic interplay between the learner and the context, making active links between what is already known and what is being laid before them. To that end the interplay of the formal lessons, homework and (rehearsal) time between lessons would also appear, to me, to be critical. How much homework is an unrelated activity, just because homework has to be given? What if the challenge was continuous, so that homework became pre-thinking, preparation for the lesson, or a reflection on the learning outcomes of the current one?

Boxing everything would appear to embed potential limitations, in inexperienced hands, but sometimes in more experienced hands, as a result of the system. From that point of view, the diagram at the header is limited as it implies boxes rather than a dynamic.
 
Tasks (should) embed a wide range of challenges for learners, including:-

Some will be investigative, some problem-solving, some using and applying what is known into new areas. All should be challenging to thinking and have an impact on learner progress. The context for a practice task needs to be considered carefully.

• There will be the intellectual challenge; do they understand the task and the nature of the challenge? Can they perceive the strategies that they will need to fulfil the task?  Some of this will be determined by the teacher explanation of the task criteria, and what needs to be done to be successful, ie the success criteria, or what the teacher will be looking for.
• For some there will be the social challenge, such as the ability to cooperate with others in sharing available resources, organising, or being organised by, others.
• Some tasks will challenge independence. This, for the adults, is sometimes a difficult judgement call. Some tasks will need direct adult support, supervision and guidance to be successful. The amount and the detail of the adult support needs to be considered when reflecting on outcomes. What could the learners do for themselves?
• Some tasks will challenge learners to take what they know, to address the challenge with that baseline understanding, then to tackle new issues, identifying what they now need to know in order to make progress in the task.
• Some tasks will enable learners to identify areas where their learning is less secure and they may well ask for clarification or revisiting of earlier learning; in other words, the task is a “test”.

Tasks are often of the kind that I would call “Blue Peter” or “recipe” tasks.

Based on the idea of “Here’s one I made earlier”, they require a copyist approach; follow the instructions to the letter and it will turn out just like the model. This approach does occasionally have a place, but, with overuse, it can embed dependence. The approach is, by default, the teacher guide in the worksheet, with limited room for the child to really show their capabilities.

The best tasks make learners think, retrieve what they already know to bring to bear on the task in hand, to consider the framework and strategy for their investigation, the information and resources that they need, their personal and group organisation (as appropriate), how they will record their progress, the timescales available, so how they will use their time effectively. This approach fits equally well in formal lessons as well as in more open situations. Learner awareness of task needs is a central element of success.

Lessons?

Activities laid end to end are not a curriculum.

• Activity/busy-ness is not necessarily challenge.
• If task outcomes are general, one set for thirty, they will only impact positively on a narrow range of abilities.
• Task setting should enable learners to go beyond the activity. Not just, “You’ve finished early so here’s another activity”.
• Consider “the loneliness of the long-distance worksheet”.
• More open tasks enable learners to show their thinking ability and, possibly, a wider range of skills and knowledge.
• In open tasks, what you see can be greater than what you were looking for.
• Children often surprise teachers in learning situations.

If you want a thinking classroom, it’s essential that everyone is thinking, not just you, otherwise you may well be working twice as hard as the children, just to keep up the momentum.

Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time for the waiting game

Last week, with my TSA/SCITT colleagues, I had a long discussion about strategic decisions that would have impact through 2018-19 and 19-20. In any organisation, it is essential to have a strategy that can be communicated throughout the participant group, enabling short term, situational decisions to be incorporated within the broader approach.

One decision, impacting on me, is that I will do one more year supporting next year’s Primary group of trainees. It’s my decision, but, looking at the longer term needs of the TSA/SCITT, they need to consider succession planning, and this enables them to do that within the year. Decisions in education are better made if there is a longer lead-in time. Last-minute decisions can become destabilising, if they become the norm.

In every school, plans for the coming year will be being made, staff appointed to vacancies, hopefully replacing one set of skills with similar or greater. A great frustration for any headteacher is having one or more vacancies in a period of supply famine. During 16 years of headship, on at least three occasions, the year started with me having to teach more or less full time, for up to half a term while adverts went out to scour the available teachers.

The pattern of each year, to some extent, is within school control; when to have parent evenings, report writing, meetings-developmental or organisational, presentations, assemblies (to include parents). Beyond that, teachers are better placed to teach if they have a coherent understanding of how the year will pan out, to ensure that everything that has to be covered is done.
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It was at the point where, as a whole school, we sat down, mapped out the school year to look at points of highest demand and also considered the idea of an annual overview curriculum plan, that teachers began to relax a little into the coming year. A relatively small investment in time had a huge impact on morale.

A “meet the teacher” parent evening was held in later September, to share the plans and make relationships. Time was offered to parents to make appointments during the term, instead of one staff meeting; three half hour slots after school.

Events such as Harvest Festival, Christmas and Easter, became extended assemblies, with everyone contributing a short piece, rather than Cecil B de Mille productions, more often sharing poetry or songs that had been learned as part of class time. It’s very easy to raise the general, whole school, stress levels with over-elaborate productions, but parents do like to be party to what their children are doing; they only have eyes for their child!

Just before February half term, we issued reports, probably equivalent to A5 in writing, with a short personal comment and key areas for further development, that became the areas for discussion at parent evenings to follow. It kept the subjects clear. Parents could respond and ask for other specific areas to be discussed. It allowed considered use of meetings, rather than reportage and response. If more than the ten minutes would be needed, then special appointments would be made, especially if the discussion needed the SENCo or another member of staff.

​Summer term reports were issued with an invitation to see the teacher if it was requested, rather than a formal meeting.

Closure days were rarely taken tacked onto holidays. After the initial day, the three subsequent days were used for development activity, with the fifth looking at the following year. Making a long weekend, especially in the summer term, proved popular with parents, as well as staff. Development periods were significantly more active from October to June, with one staff meeting being devoted to organisational matters, and three each month to subject development; sometimes single sessions spaced over time, sometimes a whole month devoted to one subject, depending on the lead’s request and possible trial activity in between.

By taking two finalist ITE trainees, some additional development time often became available, through paired staff release, at least for ten weeks.

Each year would be different, as a result of changing needs, of individuals or the school as a whole. Therefore, every year plan would have similarities, but also occasionally significant differences, for example if external curricular change was expected.

You do have to work with available skill sets. Supplemented by external expertise, either on a personal basis, through courses or one to one dialogue, or via expertise-led closures. It’s a case of fine tuning to the evident needs.

·         Overview planning allows for communication and a certain amount of diary control, both of which have a part to play in overall workload demands.
·         Teaching is demanding on a day to day basis.
·         To take account of broader needs requires careful planning.
·         The drip feed of external, often political statements, can be sufficient to become the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

There is pattern in time, in rhythm and rhyme; give thanks for a world full of pattern… but be ordered, organised and communicate.

In my experience in schools, the curriculum has always held centre stage; it’s the basis if what every teacher does. There seems to be an alternative narrative at the moment, where some seem to want to claim that somehow, and for some time, teachers have been doing otherwise.

When the National Curriculum emerged as a reality, in 1987, I was the deputy head of a First School. The first thing we did was to apportion each subject file to those with responsibility and for them to match what was being asked with what we provided and to identify the areas where adaptation, or gap filling, might be needed. This exercise identified 95% correspondence, with science being an area where topics were tweaked more than others. Subsequent incarnations of the NC required similar, relatively small, levels of adjustment.

So curriculum has been a central feature of school life throughout my career.

In the beginning, school level planning was largely topic allocation to each year group, to avoid some “nice” topics from appearing each year. Progression and objectives were a key part of deciding what to do and how it should be done.

The science programme in my first days, 1974, was based on Nuffield Science 5-13, history had Unsworth textbooks as a possible base. Every school appeared to have an Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a central feature of the library and atlases were the key resource for Geography. Our library was supplemented by the County library van visits, so pre-planning was needed to ensure that appropriate book resources were available. Topic work included “research skills”; how to use the textbooks, contents and index, to find information. Collecting knowledge was highlighted, sometimes used to create an “alphabet/glossary” of the topic, as a list or as a topic wall.

​When I became a Head, we developed the concept of the annual plan, which created two layers of information; curriculum coverage and what is now called interleaving, recalling earlier information and skills to use in the new context. An example might be letter writing, taught as a stand-alone in English, to be used later to write persuasively on a topic or perhaps review letters to an author, after a half-term of studying books by one author.  The annual plan also ensured that a broad curriculum was offered and that everything that had to be covered was covered.

This played also into a further development, of the two-page approach to writing, with one area providing the main writing task during the week; this could be reports or instruction-writing in science or other foundation subject. This approach developed out of the earlier National Writing Project, but within an exercise book format.

From this, the use of “flip sheets” supported the next layer of need, to identify specific areas where some individuals needed additional focus or support. This might be particular to a child’s special educational needs, which need to be kept continually in front of the child and supporting adults. It might also be specific areas which become apparent during work approaches, but which, if ignored, might create “holes” in knowledge or skill.

I keep coming back to this, as much of what we have done in schools ends up as a piece of writing, which is then the means by which security of achievement is judged by the teacher. To create a focus for each week enables cross-fertilisation of the knowledge curriculum within the context of the English curriculum demands.

Teacher judgement has always been a part of school life. It is, after all, that which underpins formative assessment and every subsequent decision regarding children. This now falls into the teacher standards 2,6 and 5, progress and outcomes, assessment and adaptation. These are the real sharp end of the teacher standards, where interaction, intervention and feedback support the developing learners, but outcomes also inform the teacher about the levels of security of each child, impacting on dynamics within and between lessons.

Progress, as a statement, has, to some extent, become slightly devalued in education parlance, and in terms of data judgements. It has always been the underpinning of conversations between teachers and parents, in particular, with, in days before National Curriculum levels, was as simple as comparing current performance with earlier outcomes, which is not quantified. Equally, judgements about appropriateness of the outcomes for a particular year group will depend on experience within the key stage.

In 2013/4, I wrote a piece about levelness becoming de facto yearness, with the proposed, now current, curriculum detailing what should be taught in each year group.

If we assume that the whole is shared by the teacher within the year, teacher decisions will be based on security; how well children demonstrate that they can use and apply, preferably independently, that which they have been taught. If one yearness of teaching is the norm and a child achieves 100% of this independently, have they made one year of progress; more or less?

If they don’t achieve 100%, have they made less than one year’s progress and what is done about those areas that are less secure? This question has been part of my whole career; what to do with children as they transition into a new year group with identifiable continuing needs.

This returns us to the flip sheets, where continuing needs can be recorded to be actioned in future activity. Not to record this, in my opinion, is creating a situation where the receiving teacher has to find the gaps for themselves, which helps no-one, least of all the learner.

We need simple systems that support learners throughout their school careers.
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A high-quality, broad curriculum is an entitlement of all learners. Continual interaction, intervention and developmental feedback is right and proper.
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Recording continual needs creates an aide memoire for both learner and adults. That way might support continual development, or progress, however small. 
 

Teachers are the lead thinkers and decision makers in a classroom:-

•             They need to know the subject at hand, which may be different for a graduate specialist in a Secondary school compared to a Primary generalist, responsible for a range of subjects, where some personal subject knowledge will be stronger than others.
•             They will have ordered the curriculum into discrete themes, topics or programmes of study.
•             They order and organise the coherence of their plans over a known timescale, ensure that classroom and the resources for learning support the learning proposed.
•             They know their children, to varying degrees, depending on their contact time through the week, but they are trained to understand learner development through the age range.
•             Their plans seek to match the needs of the subject with the needs of the children, providing appropriate challenge to all abilities.
•             They plan learning over a timescale to ensure a dynamic is established which fully engages learners, in and out of school, and assures the imparting of a particular body of knowledge.
•             They create tasks appropriate to the challenge, with an understanding of the subsequent developmental stages of the learning, so that by engaging with the learners while on task, they are able to guide and support their developing understanding.
•             They ensure that teacher input gets across the essential information on which the lesson is to be founded, through a variety of means, which are enhanced by the availability of in-class ICT facilities.
•             They ensure that behaviour allows learning to take place.
•             They interact with outcomes, orally in class and in writing after the lesson, while marking books. They are constantly making judgements, on an individual, group or class level.
•             They use the outcomes as new reference points against which to plan the next steps.
•             And they add broader value to schools in many other ways………………….
•             They undertake personal CPD that enhances their practice.

If teacher-think is the essential component of enhanced learning opportunities, there needs to be consideration of the barriers to this thinking. There will be more for each list.

Personal barriers:-
•             Subject or pedagogic knowledge.
•             Extended experience with a specific age group or ability range. (New school, new year group)
•             Personal order, organisation, record keeping, reflective practice.
•             Self-confidence, possible status with learners.

External:-
•             Demands for planning (thinking) in a particular format.
•             School specific, preferred approaches to teaching and learning.
•             School specific schemes, with limited opportunity to adapt to class need.
•             School organisation demanding whole year approaches.
•             School resources, including the availability of support.
•             Work space limiting some approaches.
•             Regular changes to practice to accord with external influences.
•             Local context issues, such as parent demands, children arriving at school with social or personal issues, behavioural distractions.
•             Changes at National level, particularly where there is an extended period of uncertainty about policy interpretation.

Fear:-
The greatest impact on teacher-think is the fear of being judged as ineffective and found wanting. There is a need to quality-assure teaching and learning is a school. It is naïve to think otherwise, but the systems in place can add to the stress of being observed, both at school and inspection level.

The value of feedback from an observation is to retell the lesson narrative, highlighting significant points, as a basis for discussion and development. Internal observations should always happen on this basis, not as a numeric judgement, in the same way that feedback to learners to support future learning is better as description than an arbitrary grade.

Teachers work within human systems, which can appear sometimes to be less than humane. The best systems look out for the individuals who make up the team, providing support and guidance to colleagues in the same way they do to children. Even the best practitioners can suffer a dip in performance when life offers personal challenges. Thoughtful, reflective management breeds thoughtful, reflective, autonomous teachers and independence in learners. 
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Teaching is a great job, but free the teachers to think, that’s what they are paid to do.
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Further blogs on thinking teachers:-
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teacher-think-more-metacognition
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teachers-think
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/permission-to-think
https://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/teach-teacher-teachest

Interaction and
Interpersonal skills are the stuff of life, whether two, or many,
Interlocutors; after all, life is essentially group activity. The
Interplay between people can lead to
Interesting developments. The
Interconnectedness of life can be exaggerated in some social situations like a school, where
Interlopers can find difficulty in integrating, adults as well as children.

Internalised rejection can lead to
Intermittent disagreement and the need for
Intercession to restore equilibrium. Learning to
Interact with each other starts from birth, parents and others trying to
Interpret sounds and developing speech,
Interspersed with an ongoing personal monologue
Interpreting their surrounding world. This
Intergenerational
Interaction leads to
Internalisation through reflection.

Interleaving of experience, known as life, ensures that new contexts require
Internalised knowledge to be brought to the fore in a more mature way, leading to an
Interchange of information.
Interactive conversations allow for query and clarification.

International diplomacy sometimes requires
Intermediaries to
Interpret the thoughts of one party to another. The simplicity of all these situations is learning to communicate, to
Interpret, because, at heart, humanity is
Interdependent. The group can support the individual through mutual
Interest.
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Interventions are essentially discussions, questions refining understanding between people, in order to fine tune responses. Good
Interventions require active listening and reflection before responding.
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We are all in this (world) together. Life is groupwork...

School life’s a bit more complicated than singular elements and we won’t solve workload with mantras.

Paul Daniels was a magician whose career was a regular sight on the television. As with many in his position, the phrase, “Take a card, any card”, was a standard line. It could be considered as the means by which education policy is currently being determined, but, in this case, it is likely to be take a single topic and work on that; this weekend, it seems to have been workload.

While I was enjoying the West Sussex hospitality of the #LearningFirst conference, elsewhere, Damien Hinds, Amanda Spielman and Nick Gibb were highlighting the need to address workload, as if it is a single entity that can actually be controlled. Political parties always wish to be seen to be improving education and each will claim to have the magic solution. Spoiler; there isn’t one…if there was, we'd have found it by now. Human systems are complex.

Efficiency, or, in political terms, looking for ways of continually saving money and at the same time demanding improvement across the school system, is perhaps desirable, but saving money can become the greater imperative squeezing out the potential for improvement. In any “business”, efficiency requires a period of analysis, quality planning and implementation, with ongoing monitoring and excellent communication throughout, so that all participants are aware of progress within the development journey.

No aspect of the system be “ring-fenced” and become untouchable and that includes the top down impact of Ofsted and DfE.

Having entered Teacher Training College over 45years ago, taught and been a head teacher within a 32-year career in schools, it is almost flippant to say that I have heard it all before. However, that is true, but it is also true that the impact of successive change has been tinkering, superficially revolutionary, as one system replaced another, often with piecemeal impact.

Evolutionary development was a part of system change until 1997, at which point National Strategies were introduced, with some good elements, but with significant downward pressure that had greater control over practice than previously.

Significant developments were hidden behind the political mantra of the literacy hour and the rise of the subject consultants with their ready-made solutions; the rise of the end to end bright idea, exacerbated by the introduction of Assessing Pupil Progress. This led to endless mini-lessons being taught, with specific points in mind, losing overall dynamics in the process.

It sometimes felt like the plumber’s visit, with the inevitable “Who put this in? I’ll do a better job than those cowboys.”

Each school is in a unique situation, based on location, staffing and resources. The former, ranging from leafy suburbs to inner-city can be a determinant of motivation and aspiration, both important to success. The resources, from building to moveable items, can encourage or discourage potential teachers and motivate students. The best teachers inspire students, encourage them to aspire and show them ways to achieve, with support, space and time to think given by management.

A school’s ability to attract teachers is likely to be, in some, way, determined by locality, perhaps house prices or rents, quality of the building and resources and the general feeling when visiting the school. Proximity to a university ITE department might be a factor in attracting trainees into their first jobs.

The system within which teachers work is often the limiting factor, if they are required to think and work to defined approaches. Teaching should be efficient and effective, but real learning can be messy. Internal supports, such as mentoring and seeing the whole institution as a training organisation might be key.

Consider; if, in every school, every teacher could be internally trained to the capacity of the highest quality teacher in any subject, through 30 meetings a year of quality internal CPD, supported by external expertise and challenge as identified, could the whole system benefit?

Internal controls can sometimes run counter to efficiency, especially with regard to the planning cycles. Schools should determine and communicate a coherent, holistic curricular approach, together with resources to make this a reality. These overviews will inform decisions by a classteacher over the year where they will have the class. By creating an annual plan, they are essentially demonstrating curricular coverage; one source of concern. If these are broadened over a term or half term with greater detail, the medium-term plans are likely to be the only document tat any SLT needs to know that their teachers are well planned.

If annual plans are written in July (part of a closure day) before the year, holidays can be enjoyed more. If the first two weeks of any year are given to the teacher as personal topics, to settle, get to know the children and instil some habits that will be a part of the whole year, part of a September closure after two weeks can be devoted to plans for the rest of the term, based on more detailed understanding of the children.

If, however, teachers are regularly required to hand in detailed plans for every lesson ahead of teaching them, their focus may be on the plan, rather than the needs of their learners. Planning for lessons, by each teacher, has always been a fundamental part of the role, but, on a lesson by lesson basis, what a teacher needs to write down, as an aide memoire to remember for that lesson will vary considerably. This links with experience; an early career teacher, making sense of the whole, might need to record more, which reduces as their career and confidence develops.

Ofsted and the DfE are significant parts of the system and both can appear, at times, to see themselves as founts of all knowledge, although other countries often appear to be seen as having better systems, forgetting that those countries may have been and visited ours in the past and learned what (not to) do.

There are aspects of Ofsted which I would seek to keep and tweak. There are potentially limitations to the system, which can have a detrimental impact on school development.

It is always encouraging to be told that your school is good, even better maybe to be outstanding. At the other end of the scale, a school potentially struggling with a very wide range of issues, causing distractions, will not be helped by simply being told that what they are doing is not good enough, by a team which then leaves the recovery to others. It is a very expensive audit tool and as such should add value to school development, if the country is to make full use of visiting expertise, which we are told is outstanding.

From the point of an Ofsted visit where need is identified, interventions by Local Authorities or others, such as Academy chains can sometimes then exacerbate the situation, as multiple (often simplistic) agendas are pursued, within very tight timescales. There have been examples of heads being dismissed, or resigning, as a starting point. People losing their jobs might be “Pour encourager les autres”, but it has a system-wide impact and questions over who would want to be a head; at its best, it is the best job in education.

Listening to Sean Harford on Saturday, it is clear that Ofsted has data available that indicates whether there are question marks over a school performance. Where this is the case, it is right and proper that a visit should be made and a report made available that describes, from an external viewpoint, what issues might be affecting the school; the qualitative to balance the quantitative.

As an enhancement, I would institute a validation system, like an MOT test, based on agreed teaching standards and CPD opportunities created from PM journeys.

Every head teacher and other observers would be formally trained in lesson observation.  
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This judgement would be sampled and validated through joint observations during inspection visits. Perhaps it would be better to have a coherent form of quality control, supporting their continuing professional development needs, rather than capability processes that can sometimes be haphazard as they are irregular needs.  The evidence would enable teachers to make valid claims for promotion and ensure national consistency.

I’d want every school to be visited every two years, by an experienced assessor, to explore the effectiveness of the school, looking at the local context, local issues and the internal organisation, working to validate school self-evaluation, with one of two outcomes, acceptance of judgements (possibly with advice notes) or a decision that an action plan would be needed and a second inspection visit necessary, within a specific timescale. The knowledge that the process itself was part of school development journeys would take the cliff-edge nature of Ofsted away and make better use of national expertise in local contexts.

Why two years? Schools can experience very rapid change, especially through staffing and this can have an immediate impact, especially if change is at a senior level. I would expect every school inspected to have a detailed description of development since the last inspection and an action plan for the subsequent two-year period, which would form part of the validation exercise. What has been the two-year development, how is it to be sustained and developed?

Would this system be cheaper? Possibly. To some extent, it would depend on the decision on the first proposal (external or internal) and the contact time needed for the second.

However, it would allow latitude for evolutionary development, especially if the system was allowed to run for a number of years.
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The role of headteacher can sometimes be summarised as “management by swan”, serene on top, but paddling like mad beneath. There are many incidents, some funny, some difficult, many just part of the day to day activities where “someone” has to take specific action, because it’s “someone’s” job.

​Someone, early in my teaching career uttered the immortal words, "Expect the unexpected and you won't go too wrong".
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Snow

I’d done the course, as an aspiring Deputy Head, dealing with the roles and responsibilities of management and, along with colleagues had considered the myriad of potential eventualities that might occur. The reality, when it came, had not been prepared, nor could it have been.

I had been a deputy for all of a couple of weeks when the head went off on a course. Signal a rapid change in the weather, with an overnight deluge of snow; many colleagues will recently have had the same issue to deal with and may still be suffering the aftermath. Inevitably, the calls from colleagues started arriving to say that they wouldn’t be able to get in. I had, but mainly because the motorway had been gritted. All available staff were deployed to the gates to turn back families and also to mop up the solitary children who had walked alone, to start the calls home for them to be picked up.

Eventually, children had all been dispersed, so staff also started their way home.

Before I could do the same, the caretaker arrived to say that we had run out of heating oil, none had been ordered and, if it couldn’t be sourced, we’d be closed another day. The forecast was for a thaw. Several phone-calls to the supplier and a bit of arm twisting resulted in the promise of a delivery by the early evening. In the interim, the individual hot air blowers started to shut down. In so doing they were drawing any gunk into the pipes from the oil tank, so, when the oil arrived this would necessitate an engineer to come and bleed the complete system. Calls were made to the engineers, to put them on standby.

The oil tanker arrived with the dusk, so the tank was filled by torchlight. The engineer arrived around 7.30pm, having been to several schools earlier in the day. By 10.30pm, with the school filled with a blue haze where each boiler had belched out exhaust fumes, we had virtually reached the point where the system had been put back together.
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Arriving home after midnight, having had to secure the school and set alarms, the alarm was set again for 5.30am, to get into school to check that everything was working.

Wind

I took up my headship in January 1990, walking as calmly as I could through the avenue of Scots pines that lined the path between the car park of the old Victorian school and the “new” school, Scola built, in 1975. These trees had been a part of a large estate from which the original school had been carved and were somewhere over 90 years old, planted during the Victorian period. The original school dated from 1846, with the benefactor board being found in the new school loft area.

On January 25th we had a seasonal storm. This one took everyone by surprise. It was a case of the wind howling relentlessly. The first sign of a problem was a child detailed to tell me that a classroom window had shattered and that the class had moved to the school hall. It was clear that the wind had become extreme.

Parents began to phone to say that the local roads were being blocked by trees and could they pick up their children to get them home safely. Rather than being marooned on an “island” with 160 children, the message soon got out that getting home was better than sticking it out at school. One phone line was permanently in use by office staff, phoning home or emergency numbers. As numbers allowed, non-essential staff were also sent home.

As always, we were left with a small number of children whose parents could not be contacted. They were taken to the lee side of the school, to enjoy regressing and a distraction through using the Reception class equipment.

Meanwhile, the wind picked up even more. As the children dwindled in number the safety of the staff became paramount. It was decided that those living furthest should leave first. Most of the cars were in the old school, but the wind frightened many and they took the long walk around the road. We asked them to phone when they arrived home.
By mid-afternoon, the school was almost empty, and, having contacted our local contractor, were waiting for the glazier to arrive and make good the broken window.

Consoling ourselves with a cup of well-needed tea, the first “crack”, sounding like an explosion near to hand, was the precursor to a substantial demonstration of the power of nature. The view from the office was directly through the avenue of trees. Within ten minutes, 20, 25m trees had been reduced to matchsticks, swaying and toppling, taking each other down like ninepins. Trees that had stood for 100 years were no more.

The clean-up took the best part of week, with the whine of chainsaws the backdrop to all learning.

It did make for a great deal of very exciting writing and artwork, right cross the school. Well, if you can’t make use of an event…

Electrical faults?

The new extension to the main school, negotiated over a number of years, based on the sale of the Victorian school designate as excess places brought the fun and games of endless negotiations with builders and architects.

Part of the build went into the winter period, and this included extending the alarm system.

The caretaker had been off sick for a while and, while we had a good cleaner prepared to undertake some locking up, as senior key-holder, I was, at that point, first call for an alarm activation. Over a period of ten days, we had eight times where the alarm was activated, with me turning out to school in the middle of the night, needing to call the alarm company. The police were involved on a couple of occasions, checking the building, as was the security company who also did periodic checks.

The police letter saying that call-outs would be suspended led to serious talks with the builders and alarm company, who eventually agreed to do a full survey, during which they discovered that the wiring into the new extension had been “pinched” between two different materials. Cold nights had caused some movement, resulting in the alarm going off when the temperature had changed.

It all needed ripping out and redirecting, causing further disruption, but no more call-outs, at least for a while. There were many other occasions with a semi-rural school on the edge of a large estate.

​It’s probably one thing I don’t miss from headship.

I didn’t grow up in a reading household, but we were taken to the library in Exeter and I remember coming home with a fish identification book, as I’d started fishing with friends in the River Exe.  Around the age of seven, I received a Biggles book as part of my birthday present and remember being unable to stop reading it until I finished it. It hooked me. I don’t remember the weather, but, as life was more often lived outside, it may well have been raining and staying in was better.

​Specific books do not appear again until I was 15. I had a serious rugby accident tearing knee ligaments and needing an extended period of R&R. In that time, I read Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which left an indelible impression. At the same time, 1984 and Animal Farm also made an appearance. Were they read for pleasure, or just because I had time to read them?

For quite a long time in my school-based life, giving time over to reading, apart from during school holidays often made me feel guilty. 1994 brought news of my first wife’s cancer and, in response, the purchase of a “life project”, a small cottage in France, to make an escape from real life worries for short periods. I started to find some books by Georges Simenon, via charity shops and local second-hand bookshops, to read when not involved in a DIY project or gardening. Slinging a hammock between two trees and having a half hour break created small reading spaces. Eventually, over time, the Simenon collection grew, in French and English, to be supplemented by other authors. I had developed a proper habit and stopped feeling guilty about “just sitting and reading”. It took a lot of effort and occasionally rears its head.  

​Children “reading for pleasure” appears to have been a cause of concern for the whole of my career in education, during which, having undertaken a post grad diploma in reading and language development, I have done surveys of reading at home, including numbers of books in the home. As a result, during home visits, I have met adults who rarely read anything in book form, have no books in the home and couldn’t tell you the name of any children’s author, whereas I have also visited homes where there have been library rooms and parents read to their children almost from birth.

If we were to consider reading for pleasure as something that one does outside a requirement to do so, inevitably, the approach by children to reading at home will vary considerably.

Reading at home, as mandated by schools as part of homework, can often mean children reading aloud to an adult. This then becomes a situation where a child performs to an adult, who may or may not appreciate any nuanced difficulties that the child might encounter in a specific book. If the adult then chooses to be judgemental, this can demotivate the child.

If schools were to allow children to take home books that they can read with ease, alone or to another, they may well derive greater pleasure from the experience, as they might be able to demonstrate greater facility and receive praise. In some households, too, the busyness and pressures of some family lives can mean limited time available, so reading is something that must be done, rather than a pleasant shared experience.

I have to admit to being a fan of colour coded systems, originally started by Cliff Moon for the Reading Reading Centre, where a wide range of books is sorted into broad categories of challenge.

Some will say that children judge each other, based on their colour book. They always have and always will, even if/especially if whole class reading from one book is the norm; see above and replace one parent with twenty-nine peers as was my early school reading diet.  

Within a colour coded system, teacher-level, guided books were also colour coded. As a result, a nominal decision was taken to allow children to take home any book on a colour below their guided level book, so that they could go home and read for themselves or with a parent. They were able to change their books daily if they wished. In every colour there were at least fifty books, so a child could have ten weeks of self-chosen reading, during which time, hopefully, they had moved on in teacher reading challenge.

When they finished the scheme, they had “free choice”, but with the rule of thumb of the “five finger rule”; if they read the first page and found more than five words that slowed them down in their reading, they might choose to come back to that book at a later stage.

In addition, each class had an author of the term, with books selected to provide extension, broader challenges. Letters or postcards to the authors were seen as alternatives to book reviews. One or more of the books might become the teacher read aloud book.

There needs to be thought on three layers of books; fluency, mild challenge (teacher led, five finger rule), frustration- too many words unknown reducing fluency and understanding (10 words per page as a simple rule).

Mentoring and coaching were embedded in the approach, as teachers and children regularly shared what they were reading with each other, were active in book selection from our termly bookshop, from Wessex Books (now Wells, Winchester), so were able to guide children/peers individually to books that might interest them.

Books were freely available, read by children and teachers, not just in a(n) ERIC (everyone reading in class) way, but through lots of book sharing, with enthusiasm for the process, the activity and the outcomes. Book walls shared some of the reading; eg an “I liked this book” wall.

Ease of access and availability of good quality books, time to read, share, model and talk books, all contribute to a reading culture. With tablets and laptops having recording facilities, children can read aloud to themselves and listen back, to embed some self-assessment/adaptation.

If schools don’t create a reading culture, home cannot always be relied on to do so. If children are to learn that reading can be pleasurable, they must have access to material that allows it to be so and to have time and space in which to develop independent reading habits.

Bikes have changed over time, but essentially they are machines with two wheels, powered by a pair of legs, unless the rider has decided to buy an electric bike and even then there’s a need to pedal if an extended trip is needed.

A novice rider requires additional support, three wheels or stabilisers on the two-wheel bike. Fitness and stamina will determine the speed and distance that can be covered, at every stage of confidence.

Time and space to practice, to build stamina and confidence helps the growth. Being able to travel further and faster gives some confidence to try a little more, which, in turn, builds additional strength and stamina.
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Moving from riding on the flat to hills demands an understanding or at least an awareness of gearing, one of the many improvements in design. A fit, strong rider, with a good bike and gear use can attempt more difficult terrain. This is often then done independently of coaching, as the rider “tests” themselves, reflecting afterwards on what they have achieved, creating their own plans for their next efforts.

Of course, if you are at the “top of your game”, as in Tour de France riders, the concept of “marginal gains” is likely to be supported by coaches, doctors, nutritionists, masseurs, chefs and every conceivable mechanical advantage.

These riders even have different bikes for different stages, with different wheels designed by specialist engineers to take maximum advantage.

If teaching was as easy as riding a bike, moving from class to class and from school to school would be very straight-forward. Anyone who teaches different classes or has moved schools will understand that they are similar, but rarely the same, so there’s a period of acclimatisation; getting to know a wide range of things about the situation.

Consider this list of questions/comments. These are baseline questions that any new teacher might reasonably ask, to orientate and organise themselves.

• How is the day organised in your class, year, key stage, school?
• What happens at the start of the day, after play, after lunch, at the end of the day?
• What happens when children change lessons/ tasks?
• How are task and lesson transition managed?
• How does the teacher take the register?
• How is the classroom organised? Are there zones or areas: Art Area, ICT Area, Book Corner etc?
• What is the BM policy and what rewards and sanctions are there in the class and school?
• Classroom routines?
• How are adult helpers used in the classroom?
• What do the children use to write with?   What do they write in and on?
• Do the children have targets, how do they know what they are?
• How does the teacher give feedback to the children on their work? Orally, written?
• What resources are there in the classroom?
• Where do children keep their own books and other items?
• How are book bags and lunch boxes organised?
• How is the cloakroom organised?
• What make of Interactive White Board is used?
• How are ICT resources used in the school?
• What happens at: Play Time, Lunchtime, and Assembly?
• How is the playground organized?
• What displays are in the classroom, school?
• How are displays used?
• Are there common resources? How are they organised/used?
• Does each class have common resources?
• How are children with additional educational needs catered for?
• What evidence is there for Rights, Respect and Responsibility Education
• How is children’s awareness of cultural diversity raised?
• What management/ curriculum roles are there in the school?
• How are parents and carers involved in their children’s education?
• Where do parents gather in the morning and afternoon?
• How is information communicated to parents?
• How does the school ensure the children are safe?
• How does the teacher plan?
• How does the school plan?
• What sort of planning format do the teachers use?
• How is homework used?
• What happens in any after school clubs, breakfast clubs, and lunchtime clubs?

I’ll never be a Tour rider, not even with a “growth mindset”, but, hopefully, I can keep working on my stamina and technique, especially with hills, to allow for exploration further afield. This winter, I’ve been dealing with a muscle tear, so have bought an exercise bike to keep me going through the colder months.

Security and confidence allow independent exploration and self-directed practice.

Making sure that there’s a full array of bikes and spares available and coaching at every stage would seem to be more and more necessary.

In a collegiate school every teacher is a coach in their area of expertise and someone, hopefully everyone really should know how to fix a puncture, adjust the brakes and generally oil the wheels. Teaching is a team game.

In many ways, teachers never really reinvent wheels. Rather, they refine their appraoches through coaching dialogue with experienced peers, eventually play their part in coaching and supporting novices from their early experiences through to them becoming secure and experts using inevitable technological advance to their advantage.

In so doing, they learn to ride a little better and independently add to their stamina.

.Do teachers really have “thinking time”?

When we consider a choice between two options or rewards, we tend to prefer the readily available one. In other words: the current and near future are incredibly powerful.

Busyness is the stuff of school life leading to rapid decisions, but good decisions may need a period of reflection.
With so many interactions taking place within every minute of every lesson, it is hardly surprising if those involved will, occasionally make what to others will seem an error of judgement that is instinctive. These instinctive responses are likely to demonstrate personal bias. We may not be aware of bias until an unguarded utterance demonstrates to another something of our internal monologue and they have the confidence to address this back to us.

Under normal classroom circumstances, in any classroom, it is less likely that the others, the children, will have the temerity to point out inconsistency in a teacher demeanour.
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It is, however, possible outside the busyness of the classroom, to seek to create periods of calm that allow for some reflection. From the very beginning of my teaching career, we were encouraged to be reflective, especially after a day’s work, thinking about what had gone well and what needed further thought. Some of this thinking was aided by opportunities to discuss areas with colleagues, often over a cup of tea. It might have been a matter of pedagogy or simply curriculum knowledge, the what, why and how-to of teaching. This can appear to be a luxury, but such reflective time does allow consideration of more strategic aspects which can sometimes be put to one side in a busy classroom, reducing interactions to “call and response”.

Reflection, articulation, consideration, refinement, action, evaluation leading to a further round of reflection, eventually leads to refinement, in any learning situation, at any age.

It is always interesting to interact with a school as a headteacher, external assessor and now as a Governor, talking with staff who spend their days being busy, seeking to explore the strategic aspects. It can be quite enlightening to engage in what becomes a somewhat scaffolded conversation, allowing the staff members to think before responding, moving the everyday into dynamic structures and eventually towards impact evaluation. It can also be very frustrating if the staff member cannot move beyond the descriptive into reflective evaluation.

The majority of school staff will say that their thinking time is often well outside school and often during the holidays, when the distractions are less, especially if they go home from school into the busyness of family life. We always have to be aware that periods of life can feel as if they are little more than reactive. Again, a majority are likely to find that work and home life combine to eat up their time. It is often when an external or unexpected event happens, such as personal or family illness, that a real awareness of time limitations is highlighted.

Schools that are able to create or offer quality time to reflect, to organise themselves strategically, putting in place systems that are easily articulated, well communicated and easily understandable to everyone, are likely to be calmer environments that allow for reflective reactions.

Time-poor schools, always in a phase of reactive behaviour, are likely to encounter a greater proportion of needs for immediate response, some of which will be less than secure and may well create a secondary level of problem. An example might be a behaviour issue, dealt with too rapidly, that then causes the parent(s) to become involved. The secondary layer can, in some cases, become a new level of distraction.

Making time to think can come at a cost, but it eventually has a cost-benefit.

Having a clear strategic agenda for developmental discussions, providing ongoing target dates can be a focus, making better use of time. Awareness of a direction of travel can mean all moving towards a known goal. The alternative is everyone making things up as they go along, reacting in their own way, rather than operating within known boundaries.

As in any organisation, it is a case of pulling together, or possibly pulling apart.
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When you look at the word create and some of the synonyms for it, it means to make something (happen). That describes the efforts of young children, who can be happily absorbed in making something that embeds their thoughts, even if the end-product does not, to an adult eye, look like the intention.

“Look mummy, I’ve made a …” Smiles and pride…Response? Who can fail to be moved by the child seeing themselves as a creative being?

The incomplete nature of the product may be due to a lack of experiences and ideas, hand control, choice or availability of materials, but is, to the child, a work of immense pleasure. The making gives pleasure.

You don’t have to be an expert to achieve that level.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. Albert Camus
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While the first incarnation of the National Curriculum brought Design Technology centre stage in thinking, moving Primary “making” to another level, largely by articulating stages in development in a subject that could be something of a Cinderella subject, subsequent revisions brought into play the idea of resource tasks. These could be seen as basic underpinning elements that would require direct teaching. A simple example might be showing children how to safely cut a piece of 1cm spar, using a saw and bench hook, ensuring wood held secure with one hand and a good cutting style with the saw. In the early experiences, a focus on cutting to a line might require simple practice. This activity would then be linked to measuring, cutting specific lengths of wood.

Eventually, after a period of practice, and being able to cut with some precision, a challenge might be set. One that fitted well with a Greek topic was creating a marble maze, based on a design developed on an A4 sheet of 1cm squared paper. The first step was designing the maze by shading out the “walls”, which would then be covered by carefully cut pieces of spar. Eventually, the maze would be tested with a marble run through the “passages”. While some children could undertake the bulk of the task independently, some would need support and regular guidance, especially with quality control, a clear focus on refinement.

Consider the following; design and make a paper aeroplane that will fly at least five metres. This is a very simple example which could be given to a child of 6 years. Where would the child start? Paper is the specified medium, so perhaps collecting a selection of papers would help. Exploring the papers to discover and describe (orally or in writing) the features of each would provide familiarity with the material. The need to create an aeroplane shape would require research, orally, by asking an “expert”, using library sources, or looking this up on the internet. Copying a previously made example provides the task to be practiced. To achieve the flight of five metres might require trial and error methodology, with adaptations and adjustments explored. Watching and collaborating with others, discussing refinements and persevering are all essential skills for life and work.

As children passed through the school, tasks were created that provided progressive challenges, incorporating the broader range of skills that had been learned, for example, make hats, working buggies, windmills/turbines, systems (crazy golf hole), musical instrument, puppets, storage items. The challenge would be to design and make a … to… On occasion, this would be explicitly topic linked, levers, castle gate, moving puppets.

Sometimes, it would link science and making.
Set up a fair test to find the best colour to wear when walking along the road.
Design and make a device that will project a ping pong ball 4 metres into a container.  
Using newspaper, build a framework strong enough to… hold a 100g mass 50cm above a table… hold a cup of water… hold a cream egg… span a 50cm gap between tables and hold 100/200/500g
Consider how to find out of a full balloon weighs more than an empty one.
How much stretch does an elastic band have?
Using squared paper, always the same size, fold a series of rafts with different area bases and different height sides. Which design holds the greater mass?

Problem solving, project management, collaboration and cooperation, persistence, evaluation are all side products. Working in this way can also support PSHE, as learners begin to see strengths in each other.

An example from my teaching career springs to mind. The topic for a period of time was sports. During one week, I decided to use the long, wide corridor near my classroom to set a challenge. On day one, the group of eight seven-year olds whom I thought had the greatest independence were challenged to create (design and make) a crazy golf hole, using materials available within the classroom. They had the morning as their working time. In the first fifteen minutes, they collected a range of items which might be useful. This was followed with a group discussion around a large piece of sugar paper, with ideas drawn and discussed. The build process started from the agreed plan, but soon adjustments were made, deigned to be improvements. After an hour, they had their golf hole. A period of measuring and drawing secured the design for posterity and allowed later consideration of scale, as drawings were tidied onto squared paper. Photographs were taken for reference. The main task was the use of the hole to see how many shots and how long it took for different class members to complete. This tally and timing data was later collated into charts. The group explained before starting what needed to happen to each class member, so everything was “fair”. Before lunchtime, the group sat together to reflect on what had been achieved, both in terms of measurable outcomes, but also in terms of their personal development. The maturity levels of all were enhanced, as they saw the purposes of the different aspects of learning and set the tone for subsequent groups to follow. Follow up included instruction writing, developed into reports, scale drawings for the more able, but sketch maps with measurements for all. The quality of discussion was very high, as children had had a shared experience.

Problem solving defines the purpose for learning. The clarity with which the learner can define for themselves the point of learning provides the driving force for achievement. How much learning is lost because the learner can’t see the point?