​I recognise that much thinking has been done in the area of assessment, by a wide variety of experts in the field. My interest, working with developing teachers, is to instil some working methods that will enhance their ability to make appropriate judgements about children, their achievements and their learning needs. This, to me, has underpinned my thinking about assessment for the whole of my career. 
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​Assessment is thinking; about children and progress in learning and, if they’re not progressing, or progressing more rapidly than expected, doing something about the needs.

Think engaging and appropriate activity, think learning, think progress and outcomes, think on your feet and adapt for evident need, Think before, during and after the event. That is assessment; thinking, about each and every child’s response to the learning situation. Spotting those whose behaviours show lack of understanding or effort and those who may be finding the task easy.

High awareness, high surveillance and rapid and purposeful intervention; or in Dylan Wiliam's words "the reflective, reactive teacher".

​Make quality visible, so it can be discussed and evaluated openly and regularly.
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To me, assessment is just another way of saying “Know your children, well, and get to know them even better”; to define and constantly refine where they are academically, socially and personally, so that they can be challenged or supported through carefully planned activities and interventions. Assessment in one sense is about data, but, more importantly, it is about individual children and their life chances, developed through the best available teaching and learning opportunities.

To be effective, assessment has to be seen as informed, rational judgement, leading to specific adaptation of intention, through a variety of means. Most assessment is situational, being at one level a sense that something is not going as it should and seeking to make whole again. It can also mean that under-expectation means that the level of challenge (perhaps for a few) has to be recalibrated.

Looking for inspiration in the thesaurus, the following revealed itself. These are some of the synonyms for assessment. It is possible to argue that all assessment if formative, even a test, as it informs subsequent decisions about the direction and speed of learning.

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On my main blog, I have a number of posts on marking, looking to make it a realistic aspect of a teacher life, while ensuring that children can participate fully and utilise advice and feedback effectively.

Marking; keep it simple
Marking
Is marking moderation step 1
Back to marking

In “Marking; keep it simple”, the main premise is that the child targets should be on a fold out sheet that can be seen within a lesson, to guide teacher-child conversation, but also be a guide for marking later. It can incorporate non-negotiables, as they appear in earlier scripts.

In “Marking”, there is a discussion of marking as a dialogue between the teacher and the learner. I also question the place of homework where that generates marking load.

Homework can create additional marking need, but, if the activity is considered within the learning dynamics of the topic, does not necessarily need to do so.

Consider as home activity:-

• Draft from notes taken in a lesson, to be brought back as first draft, for editing in class.
• Summarise what has been learned into three key pieces of information. Boxed, it becomes a form of revision note.
• “Drawing and colouring” to save class time for discussion.
• Personal research which adds to the lesson.
• Reading a piece of text before the lesson.

None of the above needs detailed marking, as they are part of continuous effort.

As children mature as learners, they can begin to direct the teacher to areas for marking. If, say, adjectives have been the subject of learning, then the child can be asked to highlight the adjectives used, so they are easy to see.

In “is marking moderation step 1”, the teacher is acting as quality control, feeding back to the child where their work is ok and where there are areas for improvement. Teacher judgement is key to these stages.

Moderation stage 1; teacher child conversation.

Moderation stage 2; teacher-teacher conversation.

Moderation stage 3; school-area conversation.

Moderation stage 4; school-national outcomes conversation.

In “Back to Marking”, in addition to the above, I also suggest a number of key steps to consider.

• As an organisation, schools should set marking expectations that are clear, concise and achievable and have impact on learning.
• Plan mark loads over a known timescale, so that books are marked appropriately in timescales that enable feedback to be useful. If a whole week of devoted to “assessment activity” it is not surprising if workloads are heavy, especially as they usually back onto school holidays.

Learners should see themselves as active partners in work review. It should be done with and through, not always done to. Marking in a lesson is a very supportive strategy, especially for struggling learners, where immediacy of response is needed.

There are no easy solutions, as this area is often unique to the teacher and their interpretation of expectations. But it is worth significant consideration.
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Assessment is normally based on clearly articulated or published criteria, with a judgement of whether the outcome demonstrates certain abilities, so that the assessor can say with some definition that “x can do…”. Some assessment situations also require a judgement of pass or not, with a pass at merit or distinction. These are bottom line capabilities, seen, for example in driving tests, music exams and Initial Teacher Education, each of which requires a level of competence in order to progress, with further guidance available.

Critique is what I think I do when I go to an art gallery or listen to music, usually starting from appreciation of what I like, through areas which make me less comfortable, to aspects that I don’t like. This is coupled with a rationale, so my critique is a descriptor, linked to personal insights. There has to be a “because”. As a reflective person, sometimes this is an insular activity, but, when in company, a shared reaction can become the stuff of dialogue, comparative and nuanced, and that’s the part that interests me in terms of classroom practice.

I think children and their teachers should engage in discussion of quality in work, in all subjects. With visualisers becoming a part of classroom practice, it is very easy to share outcomes and explore and diagnose aspects of the work, together, with children being enabled to explore the language and parameters of critique. Description, followed by speculation, enables the questioner to raise issues in the mind of the producer, to enable answers which might, in themselves, highlight the specific areas for improvement. I’d also expect classroom spaces to be awash with examples of quality work, on display, or in portfolios, which set the benchmark for expectation and reflection within the class. It is a holistic approach.

I am now beginning to view success criteria as surrogate mark schemes for a specific context. If they embed statements which clarify the steps that need to be taken in order to produce a piece of work of quality, they can be checked at the end to see if they have been followed.

However, on top of that, there needs to be the capacity to advise individuals about the quality within the finished work. These personalised targets, attached to the edge of the book, can summarise the qualities being sought from that learner adding to the potential for both critique and assessment. Assessment, in this scenario, becomes a “signing off” activity, with the critique proving a qualitative set of statements.

Learners can engage with success criteria and I have visited a number of schools that embed systems where learners have to highlight areas of their work which, in their opinion, demonstrate a specific success criterion or personal target, which focuses marking. Self-diagnosis of outcomes is an essential skill of editing, drafting and redrafting activities.

The TES on 19.09.2017, reported the outcomes of a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust which argued that the subject was not being given enough priority or time by most of the nation's primaries.

They found that on average, across all primary year groups, more than half of classes (58%) did not get two hours of science a week. Figures based on two surveys of teachers. Wellcome also identified a fear among teachers that children would ask a question they would not know the answer to, and a belief that science is messy, expensive, time-consuming. The study was published to mark the launch of Explorify, a new free digital resource for school science.

The history of science for children before the age of 11 has been a chequered one. Being old enough to have started at school in the 1950s, I don’t remember science apart from the occasional nature table. However, it was the age of chemistry sets and, receiving one for my 6th birthday, my bedroom was soon infiltrated by test-tube filled solutions of different colours. The brown stain from spilling some potassium permanganate on the mantelpiece was the end of that and I was banished to the shed. I did write an illustrated story of doing chemistry at home which was published in the school magazine.

Secondary, grammar school, meant an introduction to “real” science, with separate chemistry, physics and biology throughout. My early interest in all things scientific inevitably led to a spell as a lab assistant for a year before starting teacher training; again with science, but later changing to environmental education.

Primary science, by the early 1970s, had become a practical part of school life, and in the context of the integrated day, was facilitated as a group activity, with perhaps eight children working in this way, seeking solutions to challenges. The Nuffield Science 5-13 books provided both the hooks and the challenges, but also the necessary scientific background that was easily available to teachers. Local teacher centres also put on extended courses to support developing teachers. There was significant collective sharing of ideas and challenges.

This way of working continued, in my experiences in Hampshire, through to around 1997, when various strategies appeared, these included QCA guidance on teaching science. While I can accept that, in some authorities, science may not have been a strength, these QCA schemes were a form of recipe science, or science by numbers. As a headteacher, I was determined that we would never use the QCA schemes, as they would downgrade what we were offering.

​Working with successive science coordinators and an inspector visit every two years to upskill the coordinator, we developed topic specifications as the basis for each area. Some now call such documents knowledge organisers, but ours were extended documents, with expectations beyond just the knowledge.

What makes a teacher?
Thinking a little more about teacher thinking.

Teachers 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 areas of knowledge will be stronger than others. However, for both, the need to know is key. Where any teacher reaches a point where it is their own knowledge that is a barrier to children’s progress, this must be addressed urgently. In the first years, this is likely to be a constant need, especially if there is a change of year-group, or perhaps school, where the new context has different schemes. This puts inevitable pressures on new teachers, so high quality mentoring and in-school documentation should be available for everyone.

Teachers get to know their children, to varying degrees, depending on their contact through the week, but they are trained to understand learner development through the age range. Primary teachers spend 25 hours a week with their classes; a secondary teacher may see each class for two hours a week. The difference in interaction time embeds different levels of nuance of knowledge of the children. Both phases of teacher should be aware of the whole achievement range of their age range. One tweet today, reporting on Singapore education called this “horizon thinking” … what came before and what comes afterwards…

They ensure that behaviour ensures learning can take place. Working within agreed and clearly articulated school approaches, maintenance of behaviours that allow learning is fundamental.

They will have ordered the agreed curriculum into discrete themes, topics or programmes of study. Order and organisation are essential to progression in learning. Some topic areas “feed forward” into successive topics. Therefore, what is now often being called “interleaving” can be planned, although often it is recall through circumstance and a spiral curriculum.
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. The use of space and resources are in teacher control. How furniture is arranged to suit teaching, and resources are available for easy access and return, embeds an element of control, reducing some potential causes of behaviour issues.

Their plans seek to match the needs of the subject with the needs of the children, providing appropriate challenge to all abilities. This is the first stage of “differentiation”, which used to be termed “match and challenge”, with challenge being the most significant aspect. What are children being challenged to think about, talk about and attempt to do?

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 body of knowledge derive from the wealth of local and wider information and experiences. Spiral curricula, interleaving, home tasks, “flipped learning”, working memory, long term memory, practice, rehearsal all have a part to play over time.
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An example…

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 can guide and support their developing understanding. Task challenge can embed independence of thought, planning and action, grit and resilience through reflection/evaluation, revision as a group(team) or individually. An engaged teacher spots needs, coaching and teaching to need. Compare with a PE lesson elements; apply in other subjects.

They ensure that any 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. Exposition has always been a significant part of all teaching. The teacher at the front, speaking clearly and articulately, directly, explicitly, using a variety of imagery to support, video, modelling with concrete resources or through diagrams, engaging with evident audience need in timely manner. That technologies are available, e.g. visualisers, to make this exposition and modelling even more overt, should mean knowledge sharing of a higher quality.

Teachers are reflective storytellers, have a broad subject vocabulary that enables subtle retelling with appropriate links made at different levels of need, with a high degree of audience awareness.

They interact with outcomes, orally in class and in writing after the lesson, while marking books. They are constantly making judgements or assessments, on an individual, group or class level. Within lessons, teachers are audience aware, looking for signs that imply lack of understanding. They ask questions, closed to elicit discrete knowledge, but also open ended to allow broader thinking, explanation or articulation of thoughts.

They use the outcomes as new reference points against which to plan the next steps. Outcomes offer another layer of reflection on assimilation of learning, with two layers of response, teacher, what needs to be further addressed, child, what do I need to do to improve? The one potentially impacts on the next lesson, the other might simply be feed forward notes for consideration in subsequent work. Teachers talk now of whole class feedback. If a teacher notices, because of a lesson, that a large proportion of the class don’t “get it”, the next step has to be a revision to secure that learning. ‘Twas ever thus. Equally, by identifying a group with need, to offer challenge to the secure group, enabling detailed remodelling to another, bringing them up to speed, would appear sensible.

Teachers add broader value to schools in many, many ways. Working in teams, subject, year group, whole school, thinking, working and occasionally playing together, the team ethic has an impact on daily school life through personal interactions, setting a positive tone among the adults. Some offer specialist clubs or other interests, including subject expertise to the benefit of the whole.

They undertake personal CPD that enhances their practice. Starting as high-quality thinkers, most teachers are life-long learners, so engage with each other to share expertise, formally or more often, informally. Many attend local events, through subject groups and cluster initiatives, perhaps travelling to specialist conferences, in school time, or, as is currently the case, to a plethora of volunteer organised conferences, Teachmeets, TLT, Pedagoo, ResearchEd, Northern (southern) Rocks, Primary Rocks, Reading/Writing Rocks…  Equally, a number also interact via social media, such as Twitter, which then acts as a conduit into conferences.
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Teaching requires a collegiate approach to thinking and self-development. One starts as a novice and assimilates information from many sources, creating a sense of self that contributes to professional confidence. Expertise develops over time, but, as in all learning, there is always a little more that can be found.

​Teaching requires life-long learners.

“The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.”
― Dylan Wiliam, Embedded Formative Assessment

The term plenary has crossed my path this week. It’s an interesting word, which seemed to derive from the three-part lesson that was seen as good practice when the National Strategies came about. It was the final part, the drawing together of what had occurred during the lesson and deriving significant learning points to take forward into subsequent lessons.

Or that was the supposed intention.  

For some, the plenary became a last activity to fill the final five minutes of a lesson, which may or may not, have a bearing on any learning during the lesson. It stood as a finale, in the same way as “starter” activities could also be separate activities, argued as a means to get children thinking in a particular subject at the transitional stage of a lesson.

This week, plenaries have been discussed as in-lesson interactions, where teachers spot a need and engage with a proportion of, or the whole class, to address a misconception. The problem with in-lesson “plenaries”, in the hands of an inexperienced practitioner, is that they can be done for the sake of being seen to be done.

Interventions, of any description, need to have a rational purpose.

“I’m stopping this child, group, class lesson, because I need to check x, in order to reassess, or reset where the learning is going.” It can even be articulated in that way to the children. It might be an occasion to use different resources or models, scaffolding ideas to ensure some additional information is embedded, to be incorporated into a task, allowing a greater degree of success in the outcome. It is the point where the teacher assumes the role of coach or mentor, unpicking the fine details of, sometimes individual need, fine tuning teaching and learning demands appropriately.

It is, to all intents and purposes, the point where teacher standards 6&5 impact on standard 2; spotting a need, addressing it and ensuring some positive achievements. In Dylan Wiliam’s terms, it is the point where the reflective teacher becomes reactive, based on the evidence of the child, group or class needs.

In other words, just good teaching.
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“feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning,”
― Dylan Wiliam, Embedded Formative Assessment
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You can’t see me learning

If talk supports learning, so it follows that children need to learn to talk to a purpose, so that it enables learning. Pie Corbett’s Talk for Writing and Philosophy for Children encourage purposeful, deeper talk that goes beyond finishing and activity. However, there is a greater imperative to incorporate high quality talk purposes into every aspect of teaching and learning; the teacher is the model thinker and speaker in the classroom...
 
You may not “see” me learning, but have to rely on other things.
The term “proxy” appears often, but seems to be used as a negative.
Proxies can apparently include engagement, motivation and interest,
Which have been evident in classrooms forever.
Apparently they’re not learning.
Working might also be a proxy; busyness certainly doesn’t necessarily mean learning.
That’s been a constant throughout my career.
 
It’s easy to give children busy work, low level activities.
It always has been; just colour in this picture…
Before differentiation, we use the term match and challenge,
With challenge being the significant driver.
Task design was carefully considered to embed a clear outcome into a process.
Something to think about, to talk about, to decide, do act on, to review and revise,
To create or produce, so that both the outcome and the process could be evaluated.
 
We talk of a thought process, which is enhanced through talking ideas and getting feedback,
Which becomes an activity process,
Working to create a suitable solution to the problem that’s been set.
And when it’s finished we can look at the outcome,
reflect on what we’ve done,
edit and improve if the need is immediate,
or hold in mind those things that we need to work on further.
 
So, no, you can’t see my learning.
You can talk with me about what I am doing
and get a feeling for my thinking and where the journey is taking me.
You can give me advice and help me to refocus if necessary.
You can sit with me and talk through a problem as my guide.
You can critique the outcome of my thinking, a form of conversation.
 
To know my thinking, you need to listen, to observe, to engage in discussion, to guide, to help me evaluate and decide where to focus next; in other words, to be party to my thinking. Otherwise you might be guessing.

That way, what I produce can improve, with quality creating pride and a focus for effort.

Learning needs challenge, focused effort, constant editing or evaluation, occasionally support and refocusing.

It can’t be seen in and of itself, but you can perceive my growing capability and enable me to build myself as a learner.
A range of blogs that look at the place of talk in learning.

All talk? Every lesson is an English lesson.
Voice activated
Articulating thoughts

If you type the word quality into the search box on my blog site, you’ll come up with ten pages of blog references where the word has appeared. Quality is the hallmark of (high quality) education. It is, in my opinion, the essence of what teachers try to do each and every day; raising the quality of what children achieve.

This means, of course, that each and every day, teachers are making qualitative judgements about what their children achieve. With experience, teachers begin to calibrate their judgements more finely, as they have seen a greater number of outcomes. This fine judgement enables more refined responses to the individual concerned. In many ways, it is the qualitative judgement that informs formative assessment; aka thinking about what the children have achieved and deciding what that means for the next course of action.

Therefore, to me, improving the quality of teacher judgement has always seemed to be central to CPD, or PPD, as it often affects individuals.

We have a relatively young teacher force. Primary NQTs entering the profession in September, will have had between 100 and 150 days of direct in-school experience. This will have been across two key stages, with a gradual build-up of experience in each, in a school context supportive of trainees and with a direct mentor available. As a trainer, I always emphasise moderation activities, to promote professional dialogue about processes and the output.

Whether we like it or not, stratification of children happens; teachers and peers know who is the “best” reader, writer, mathematician, gymnast… They also probably know the opposite. The difficulties can occur when fine-tuned judgements are needed, especially where direct teacher intervention may be needed. And, in many ways this is what concerns me, especially where so much attention is placed on summative judgements and the ensuing data crunching.

There are simple questions that aid calibration of judgement; is this “good enough” for a year x child? Is it better than “good”? If it isn’t good enough, what needs to be addressed? What are the implications for the next teaching session, with a range of outcomes from this one?

Unless the activity devised by the teacher is a “copyist” one, where every child will produce an almost carbon copy of a teacher model, there will be a range of outcomes. Even if every child in a class is “above average”, as can occasionally occur, there will still be a range. Moderating discussion of outcomes is comparative, with embedded criteria being identified as evident or not.

Not that long ago there was a system of levels as a national judgement, used by every school to describe the stratification of outcomes. That these levels were used to give feedback on children’s developing work was inevitable, but over time, from the start in 1987, the move from using the descriptors to the numerical forms distorted their use and utility. We still have a form of descriptors within the year-based approach to the current National Curriculum, with a number of tracking systems ticking off coverage (at least what they’ve planned) and hoping that summative evidence will enable sufficient numbers of children to be described as “at (or above) standard”. In some case, you can’t be “above standard” until term three of the year, as you haven’t covered everything.
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And then you end up with this: the set of descriptors that are used to stratify children at the end of the key stage. How helpful is this to further progress, or to identify what needs to be tackled next? It is no use to child, teacher or parent. Ten ways to say you’re not “at standard”. In other words, a waste of teacher (and system) time.
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I look at this slide through the eyes of one who was a class-teacher in 1987 when levels were introduced as part of the National Curriculum. They were developed through the work of the Task Group on Assessment and Testing; TGAT, using the available expertise. (blogged about that here) In the context of broad, balanced and very relevant curriculum developments, they were only ever seen as guidance descriptors, to help with teacher judgement, highlighted through moderation activities, a novelty for some. They did move teacher expectations at the end of year 2 to 80% plus achieving a generalised level 2 or better and, in year 6 to level 4 or better. The descriptors described general capability. They enabled standards to rise over a relatively short period.

Today, we have yearness instead of levelness, and in the context of year-based outcomes, I would argue that the statements in James’ slide hold as much for the present as for the recent past, but with the added disadvantage that no-one knows what any of the statements really means. Outcomes are still largely best fit, and gaps can still occur and they certainly don’t tell us the detail that will help future teachers to build on prior learning in detail. If you set a pass mark at 75, with a range of outcomes, there’s not really much difference between 73 and 77, probably decided by qualitative teacher judgement, but is between 60, 75 and 90. It’s the same set of problems. We just think we’re cleverer in having a novel way of describing difference. Numbers don’t describe what a child can and cannot do.
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This is one of the reasons why, with my school, we developed an approach to writing that allowed individualised progress and feeding forward of needs, so that they could not be forgotten by either the child or the teacher in the busyness of learning.

Workload issues have been there throughout my working career in teaching, from 1971, and, from tales told at that time, was ever thus. My earlier thoughts were captured in this blog.

It has always struck me that workload becomes an issue when the status quo is shifted, by an initiative that can be presented by any layer of responsibility, but when it’s from Government, it is then interpreted by leaders at LA or Academy level, before dissemination and further adaptation within each school. At this point, teachers, who are “delivering” what has been required, are then expected to get their heads around the new approach, continue with the old before implementing the new, the implication being that up until then they had been doing something inefficiently.

Having been party to every incarnation of the National Curriculum, from 1987, the 2014 approach was, by far the most radical, requiring significant alteration to approaches, while also embedding changes in wider approaches, such as SEND legislation, GCSE and A level exam systems. It is not surprising that teachers are complaining about workload, especially if systems are in constant flux. Education requires a significant level of consistency, so that everyone knows what they are doing.

One area that will never be removed from a teacher workload is thinking about learning. In many ways, the key issue with teaching is that it can be very hard to switch off, and, with teachers being their own personal critics, sometimes the thinking needs to be identified by others, in order for the teacher to talk through their concerns. There will be variability of need from early career novices through to experienced colleagues taking on extended responsibilities. That experienced colleagues need to support, guide and mentor younger teachers is to the common good. If a novice quickly becomes effective, it reduces the team demand.

After one Ofsted, I sat with my staff and talked in detail about workload, in order to strip out unnecessary duplication and to refine the need to write things down, particularly in the short term, where reflective and responsive teaching was particularly needed. It took a little while to come to overall, effective decisions, but, in the end, it had an impact on every element of the teachers’ lives, and built in a form of PPA time well before it was a requirement.

I can’t help being someone who prefers order and organisation and overall planning. It has always seemed to me that good overview plans allow for appropriate or necessary diversions along the way, which are in response to evident needs. Running an effective school requires an organisation that is well known and a common thread for every teacher, but, I am a firm believer in seeking to release the talents of each individual teacher for the benefit of the whole team.

We drew up a holistic framework that sought to describe the detail of what the school was about in terms of organising for learning. This was an overview that could be easily understood by a wide range of people. As a Head, it was important, for me, to know that we had approaches that ensured that what we had to cover was actually planned to be covered, in the available time.

Two diagrams articulate the general thrust of thinking, at different points.

Every subject area had developed a range of support materials that we called topic specifications. Some people are today calling them knowledge organisers. They were designed as start points for thinking, especially to support non-specialists and to ensure that every child received a broad, balanced, relevant and engaging curriculum. Each articulated the available school resources and suggested challenges that were appropriate to the appropriate year groups. They were revisited every two years with County inspector support, so that they were up to date and each subject manager had personal CPD from their subject lead.
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We organised what we called an annual plan, for each year group, to be worked on during a July closure day, in preparation for the coming September. This meant that 1) teachers knew what they were going to do in the first few weeks and 2) I knew what was intended across each year in July. It also saved teachers some valuable holiday time.
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In addition, we also built in a two week, return to school, topic, completely down to teacher choice, in order to get to know their new children and to embed expectations. On the Friday of the second week back, we held a closure, where, in addition to early year needs, a proportion of the day was given to planning in detail the next few weeks of learning. Again, this allowed teachers to, perhaps, think about their plans during the holiday, but removed the need for them to write everything down in detail for me.

I asked for two layers of planning, the annual plan and the term overview. This was to support supply cover, should it be necessary.

Short term plans were seen as aides memoire for the teachers. We provided hard back, A4, note books, within which teachers would keep whatever notes that they needed, available to need if queries were raised about teaching, but the format was not prescribed, so that teachers could note whatever they didn’t want to forget!
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However, we did create a format that could be used by student teachers within the school, which was available to any staff who wished to record their lessons formally, or, on one occasion, where significant questions were raised about capability.
Many teachers created a form of medium term, weekly or fortnightly planning, to emphasise the dynamics of learning.
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Planning articulated the expectations of, say, writing forms, and the specifics that would be embedded in a good outcome, eg, a letter, where to put the address(es) and date, the start formalities and the appropriate endings. The contents would be the subject of discussion and modelling, with writing frames developed to support some needs and emphasise personal organisational challenges. The two page approach to writing development provided further support.
The specific needs of individual children, in writing, were articulated on flip sheets. These were available to children and any adults engaging with their learning support. So, if, for example, a child needed to select adjectives or adverbs more carefully, this would become a topic for discussion when engaging with the developing outcomes. The flip sheets also became de facto records of challenge and achievement across the year, summarised in reports/data. They certainly focused teachers' minds on their marking, which became much clearer.

Recording evidence, as we did, also provided evidence for the specific needs of individual children, especially where they were greater than that of their peers. The following crib sheet was not in use, as it was developed in line with 2014 legislation, but the framework certainly was evident in practice, supported by a very active SENCo. 
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Teaching’s like that, in that we have a journey on which to take a cohort of children. They will be known, to some extent, ahead of time, although the receiving teacher might have to recalibrate their prior expectations to tailor their responses to the new group. This applies to every teacher taking on a new class each September. It is especially important for a NQT, whose experience may yet be limited. However, in both cases, there are collegiate co-pilots, those who had the class before, whose insights are invaluable, but can also be subject to their own biases towards specific children, often on personality grounds.

The children come with a learning and achievement past. Records are shared, but, in the absence of descriptive information, data can mask both achievement and personal needs to cover “missing” bits from prior learning. I have to say that this has always been an issue. Specific personal needs have rarely been shared as effectively as they could, especially at transfer and transition, leaving receiving teachers to spend time reordering their thinking. Taking previous books into the new year, or at least copying a latter piece of good achievement, can provide an essential baseline for both the teacher and the child. To also have specific, personal needs highlighted as prompts for teacher and child focus ensures that “gaps” are at least identified and then capable of being addressed.

Learning is a continuous process. Why do we allow time breaks to become potential points for learning loss, which can be magnified in a change of school? There are many years of evidence of loss at years three and seven.

Where we had a system of levelness from 1987-2014, we now have the notion of yearness, described in terms of age related expectation, or ARE. Although some regularly argue that new assessment systems should not recreate levels systems, in many ways it could be an inevitability. Teachers are required to make judgements; there’s even a new kid on the block calling itself comparative judgement, which implies a level of judgement that allows comparison of two bits of work, taking me back to teaching before 1987.

Ordering classes according to whether they are coping with specific aspects of work, or who’s seemingly achieved and who needs additional help, has been a standard part of practice throughout my career. It’s how teachers think, at an organisational level. Dylan Wiliam now wishes that he’d called Assessment for Learning (AfL) reflective, responsive teaching. I just see it as essential teacher decision-making, as per this diagram.
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It’s when we get to the level of personal needs that teachers cannot be expected to remember every child’s needs.
To address this, in my Primary school, we developed exercise books as personal organisers, with flip sheets that allowed teachers to create prompts for themselves and the children to ensure focus on specific potential gaps. The interaction of the teacher with the journeys of each child, is the key to progress for each. Keeping an eye on specifics within interesting contexts allows for regular use and application, allowing children to maintain themselves within the class, with personal targets within the context targets.

Engagement and feedback are essential.

The teacher acts as sub-editor on written outcomes, giving feedback on technicalities, but when faced with a finished piece of work becomes a reader, offering a critique to the writer, in an effort to improve structural quality. As a teacher, they also make quality assurance decisions that then impact on their subsequent actions. Teachers will always interact with children at the level of “experts”, whatever their level of subject expertise. Their feedback, whether verbal in-lesson or written, post-lesson is a part of the child and class learning process; a form of guided reflection.
How much self-evaluative thinking are children really involved in?  

An earlier blog looked at process and product evaluation as an essential aspect of progress. I’ve extracted a short piece.

We talk in terms of a thought process, not a thought product, but there can be a product of thought. So the act of thinking is a process, not an end in itself. The challenge to think around a problem, to analyse and make a judgement about how to proceed, to order and organise a coherent plan of action, to carry out the action with record keeping embedded, then to review and evaluate the process and the outcome, suggesting areas for re-assessment, are higher order thinking skills leading to potentially different outcomes . To give a group of children a “recipe” to be followed is a lower order set of skills, following instructions, leading to thirty exact copies. The former approach leads to questions such as “How do I….?” rather than “I can’t…..” These two responses suggest, in the first example, the need for a skill as identified by the independent learner, while the second can suggest a block and dependence.

Within these areas, are teachers and supporting adults the barriers to learning? It is very arguable that they may become so, often inadvertently, by designing inappropriate tasks that cover all the children, in so doing potentially limiting a number of learners and over-challenging others. The implications for classroom practice can be great, particularly in resource terms, cost, access and use. The first can be limited by the use of recycled materials, or no cost collections, such as newspapers, boxes and so on. Storage and access need to be overcome. Thirty children all needing the same materials at the same time will cause chaos, unless there is clear organisation for use and return. Resources across the curriculum need to be in the classroom, easily accessible and available to be selected by children in their need to solve a problem.

Support staff, often concerned that the children for whom they are responsible have to fulfil the task as set by the teacher can become actively involved, in the more extreme cases actually taking over from the child to finish the activity. This can be the case in an art activity, especially activities such as cards for a special occasion. Why can’t Teaching Assistants be deployed with groups to allow independent tasks to be undertaken with an overseer as observer?

I think issues arise with teacher tracking of children’s outcomes. I’d argue that the system above for Primary writing is, in itself a form of personalised tracking, of need, outcomes and feedback. Reading records, at Primary, are often based on an adult making contemporary notes from hearing readers, but can also be as simple as a personal bookmark, with books read being recorded (by children). Maths books could benefit from flip sheets of reminder prompts.

Extrapolating the tracking of essential information into data points, is the area that has caused the greatest concern, as multiple pieces of information are expected to be collated into a simplified decision, formerly something like level 4b, now it’s +/- ARE. That’s also where the issues are then often hidden, especially at year end transition, with receiving teachers making assumptions based on the available evidence.

As a teacher and as a driver, you cannot take your eye off the road, keeping a check on those around you, to avoid accidents. Occasionally a stop is needed, to take stock, relook at the map, possibly rejig the route, especially for some, or to refuel and replenish supplies.

Journeys are rarely as simple as A to B. Actually, a detour can provide unexpected highlights that add colour to the journey.

Motorway driving can be very boring; I’m taking what used to be called Route Nationale (RN), but which now is renamed Route Departmentale (RD). As long as my journey of forward, I’ll get there eventually, making decisions as I go.

(as discussed on Twitter)
During a long day in London, yesterday, where I was enjoying some sightseeing before meeting my daughter to see my grandson take part in a Chance to Dance, the Royal Opera House charity opportunity for children in some London boroughs to receive some high quality dance tuition and experience.

As it was hot, I took advantage of occasional shade and, inevitably, wandered into Twitter. A regular feature is assessment. It has been so for several years, and, surprise, no-one’s cracked the definitive approach.

I think everyone agrees that it has something to do with interacting with learners and their different parts of their learning journey, although that is sometimes differently expressed, occasionally with polarised views; you could occasionally sell the ice…

SATs and testing generally, are seen by some as an essential good, while others see them as blunt instruments of child torture that make an overall judgement based on narrow areas and, if Twitter is to be believed, subject to significant moderator error across a major subject component, writing.

In discussing assessment, the demise of previous use of levels is welcomed by many (on Twitter), with possibly equal numbers (not on Twitter) wishing they were still available, at least as a form of descriptor guidelines. It is certainly frustrating that, in the thirty years since levels appeared in the 1987 National Curriculum, that the descriptive aspects became lost in the data scramble that characterised the latter 1990s.

Levels, to some, are almost described anti-knowledge. As a practitioner when they were introduced, they were a useful addition to the knowledge areas, to describe the child’s ability to use and apply their knowledge in more challenging tasks, with a degree of independence.

Yesterday’s conversation was with Clare Sealy @ClareSealy, Tim Roach @MrTRoach, Kate Aspin @etaknipsa and Juliet Green @s0f0nisba, with occasional interjections from others, including Daisy Christodoulou @daisychristo. It would be impossible and impractical to utilise all the tweets. Suffice to say that there was a level of disagreement and an occasional meeting of minds; probably as there would be if we were face to face.

Some of the discussion also reflects the different roles and sectors of the participants, which inevitably adds a particular slant to points raised. Current classroom teachers spend a great deal of time interacting with learners and their outcomes, as has always been the case. There will be variation between Primary and Secondary due to frequency of contact and closeness of relationships; it’s easier to get to know 30 children with 25 hours a week contact than 200+ only seen a few times a week. Kate Aspin and I are both involved in ITE, so see the need of developing teachers, whose training involves at least two school placements, where each school may have radically different systems to guide interaction with learning.

Anyone reading my blog over the past few years, will know of my view that assessment is essentially what drives all teacher thinking, helping them with analysing the needs of the children in their class, planning effectively, delivering high quality lessons, with informed interactions, reflecting during and after the lesson, recording any necessary details to support their thinking. Assessment can be summarised as how well you know your children, from ongoing and summative activities.
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A long conversation was generated by my tweet that proposed locality dialogue to agree standards, through guided moderation activity, which I think should be seen as staff development activity.

My thoughts, tweets, on what teaching was like in 1986/7 is bullet pointed.

·         1987 reminisces. 85-87 National Writing Project improved process and outcomes. NC provided descriptors that enhanced collective dialogue.
·         1986 NC gave a language of notional progression that enhanced colleague dialogue. Previously was much less specific.
·         The National Writing Project instituted the idea of dialogue between children and teachers, to establish quality and tentative next steps.
·         Expectations rose, with greater clarity, so transition with l4 more than "good 3". Government exemplars also helped understanding.
·         Local Advisors and inspectors worked to common agenda, so widespread sharing in local networks. Sharing outcomes included process discussion
·         Strategies and APP distracted and distorted dialogue to minimalist progression; assuming learners would draw elements together. Skill loss.
·         Holistic processes, well modelled, together with informed interaction and intervention is needed, then you have quality outcomes to judge
·         Loss of common language reduces understanding and confidence in decisions; TS 2 drives 6&5, fine tuning to evident need.
·         So teachers revert to activities, rather than developing learning journeys. APP style tracking makes this worse.
 
There were a number of organisational differences in 1987.

Class sizes were bigger, TAs didn’t exist and technology was very simple. Timetables, apart from PE and music (timetabled in the hall), were very much in the teacher’s hands, which meant that flexibility could be built into challenges, with writing tasks taking whole mornings, practical science investigations being developed over a week, or in the case of a need for an extra ten minutes to complete a task, children “bridging” playtimes and carrying on for a while, with transition to the next lesson delayed. “Quality First” meant quality outcomes ahead of time-limited activities, which can be more of a feature in a rigidly timetabled system. Activities are then designed to fit the available time; what can you really expect in the 20-30 minutes available?

Staff talking together and moderating outcomes began to use the common language, which enhanced their expectations and so outcome quality rose. Process enhancement from planning, through drafting, to evaluation of outcomes, led to further raising achievement.

Creating real audiences for outcomes, through open area displays and class books, created motivation and pride in presentation. So it became a case of create quality, share quality, unpick quality (enhance qualities of the writing), publish quality, so that children wanted to do more.

With the current situation with assessment being somewhat fluid, it can be very difficult for trainees and providers to give a clear overall picture of what they might encounter in schools. This year, School Direct trainees have encountered a different system in each of their placement schools, which adds to their performance concerns.
 
·         Consider the need of developing teachers. Insecurity can lead to added workload, checking and double-checking. Mentoring essential.

·         In a group of nine mentors, had seven different systems. New school experience, new system...

·         Think the need to spend a bit of quality time talking together in locality could be seen as de facto CPD. Guided self-help groups?
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I would like to see exemplar portfolios, locality and national, discussed with expert guidance, to share the thinking of an experienced colleague as they unpick the positive elements and learning needs being shown. This was a part of the original National Curriculum. Exemplar booklets, drawn from a wider area than our locality, showed what was being achieved elsewhere. This knowledge added to our local challenges.

Mentors need the confidence to be able to demonstrate what an acceptable standard of outcome is and what would be an aspirational outcome, so that the trainee had insights that supported learner journeys. In some ways, despite the availability of easy linking, through the internet, many schools are, like in 1987, little islands, which would be fine if they achieve highly, but could be disastrous for the children and their teachers if they do not have an idea of how high they could aspire; consider the needs of geographically disadvantaged schools.

The journey;
·         the thinking processes in response to challenges; the development of a toolkit of ideas and words, within a knowledge rich environment; the ability and time to draft and alter ideas, forever seeking self-improvement through guidance and coaching dialogue; making the learner at least part-owner of their journey,
·         takes time, reflection, high quality interaction and guidance, occasional detours for enhancement, but is always under the watchful eye of the teacher, who acts as overseer, quality control, guide and counsellor,
·         building up progressive baselines of quality against which the next outcome can be compared.  
In the “old days”, it was common practice, before levels, just to flick back in a child’s book to compare their current work with a previous piece. This was a simple mechanism to show them their own progress or that their output had declined.

From 1987, level descriptors and the National Writing Project approaches came together in a simple use of an exercise book, as many of you will have seen, but which might be of interest to new readers (see links below). It also gave rise to the use of one book for all writing, in whatever subject, to maintain a focus on the writing, for example, writing a science report, a trip account, how to play a sport, how a piece of art/DT was created, were all seen as report writing, so became the main focus for that week. Storyboarding and scaffolding aided first drafts, with interaction between drafts. Writing went across all subjects. Flip out sheets became prompts for in-lesson dialogue and evaluation. they were also a focus for detailed marking.

It wasn’t at all a bad approach. The outcomes in the last SATs of my headship gave us 90% level 4 and above writing scores. In a class of thirty, one child (3.3%) had come from Zimbabwe with limited English in year 6, but got a level 3a, with the other two achieving the same.

For children at that time, 2005, transition to Secondary was positive, as they enjoyed their learning and had some credit for their achievement, so did not have the stigma that can be attached to the current nomenclature “not at Age Related Expectation”. Implied failure, at any age, will be demotivating. On a long journey, you need encouragement to keep going, not a message to say that you’re not doing well enough.  

Children need a language that allows them to clearly understand where they are in their journey, what they need to do next, and, more importantly, how they can achieve this; a stepped explanation and exemplification that is easy to access and use.

Teaching today can sometimes appear too full of jargon, to the detriment of learner progress. We need assessment language in child terms. If there’s a need to interpret this to data speak, that is a teacher level role.
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After all, it’s all based on assessment; refined/agreed judgements, leading to quality challenge in tasks, not small scale busy work...

Remember 24652=refinement.

​I was surprised, this week, when a post that I wrote last year passed by my Twitter timeline. In this, I looked at the impact of successive education secretaries over my career and how during the past forty years, education has become a central theme in politics. This could be because successive Governments have hived off other direct responsibilities leaving the rump of public service roles.

It is a truism that children are largely born into the world in the same ways as they always have, apart from medical interventions that are now available where they weren’t previously. They grow through whatever experiences their families offer then they enter school. They show variability at that stage, which might be an indicator of learning issues or perhaps of limited pre-school experience and interactions.

From entry, the teacher and other adults, through interacting with the children, begin to make judgements and fine tune their interactions to elicit detailed information. This may require a form of interpretation, unpicking the concept being experienced and tracking back in language forms, supported by manipulable resources or modelling, to a point where the child is able to engage at their personal level of understanding.

Where a child is in EYFS, the detail in records kept during that phase can be used to interrogate the possibility of the child having Special Educational Needs.

Tracking back and tracking forwards is a descriptor of a teacher life, in language and conceptual terms. We are continually told that “learning is not linear”, yet planning for teaching and learning is, with the examined implication of linear accommodation of each new element of learning. The year cohort approach to the National Curriculum assumes that each cohort should move as one, in a linear fashion, apart from the judgements that a child is, or isn’t at Age Related Expectation. If they aren’t, they will take forward a deficit, which has to be bridged, if they are to have any hope of keeping up with peers over time.

Therefore, in any classroom, at any one time, there will be a range of capabilities and understandings, even in a set or stream.

Inclusion was an item on the radio this morning, in the context of SEND. When the word was introduced, I was keen that the term should not just be used in this regard, but in a broader definition, which I framed as; an inclusive school is one that does it’s best, within the school capacity, to offer a quality education to each child, ensuring that any difficulty is identified, addressed and tracked, with clear evaluation underpinning decisions, including the use of external expertise. Where a school has utilised every available course of action, consideration should be given to alternative placement, where additional expertise or resources are available.

Labels and levels regularly flit by, as an addendum. If a child has a need, is that a label, or a descriptor? Levels, in the original National Curriculum, were clearly available as descriptors, and, where they were adopted as such, offered a language for discussion children’s learning. I blame the data bods for usurping the numbers of levels to supposedly predict progress, where, in reality, progress is effected in each classroom, a bit at a time, by a well-informed teacher with the skills and abilities to interact with the learning needs of each child, where this is evident. 

Progress is an interaction between the process of learning, including the quality of the teacher input of information into the lesson, and the outcomes from the child assimilating this information and being able to utilise it to fulfil a challenge, at whatever level is appropriate to the child. A post-activity evaluation can determine the next appropriate steps and the focus for the child.

This week, I have been making my last visit to School Direct trainees, and, in a couple of weeks’ time will host an interim meeting for Winchester University Post Grad mentors to review their progress to date. The essence of all the discussions can be refined to a few of the Teacher Standards; 2, 6&5, progress and outcomes, assessment and adaptation.

These, particularly standard 2, are critical to all decisions that affect learning in classrooms. If a teacher doesn’t know what “quality” outcomes look like for their year group, their underlying decisions may be faulty. This has implication for context expectation, so inter-school moderation is a key factor. With a young teaching force, breadth of experience may become a self-limiting factor. We are approaching the latter part of one year and schools are looking to the next, with decisions being made about teacher placement. PG and SD trainees may well be teaching year groups other than those in which they trained, and many will be in different school contexts, with structural differences to accommodate, as well as the different needs of children.

Quality awareness is a precursor to any form of quality control. This has to be a school-level discussion, so that every teacher is made regularly aware of potential expectations. Is it any wonder that many begin to struggle in their first years? It was a problem with sub-levels; what was the difference between a 4b and 4a?

Progress and outcomes are still subjects for debate among experienced teachers. Is it any wonder that trainees find this area fraught with possible issues? But, essentially, it is the single area that has the greatest impact across every decision, as per this diagram.

As the picture at the top of the blog says, we need these young teacher and their colleagues, to be the lead thinkers in their classrooms, to be capable of interpreting the needs of learners and to have the ability to adapt to these needs. They need to be aware; spotting and dealing with need at different levels, recording and tracking their concerns and their discussions with experienced peers, helping to make decisions about where a child’s learning journey will develop.

Interpretation takes time. Many of us, in using another language, make elementary errors, but, with practice, this becomes more refined and appropriate to need. Developing teachers need to be able to speak fluent “child-speak”, modelling and making appropriate links to “adult-speak” for those who struggle
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So, if I was a Primary head today, what would I want to be doing?

• Create an inspiring range of challenging topic and project areas that would embed the necessary knowledge to be used in other scenarios. These would have time allocations, not necessarily to fill a half term, so that Science, History, Geography and Technology all had a secure place.
• Ensuring that each element was appropriately resourced so that it could happen and be of quality.
• Link the English and Maths curriculum in such a way that each could make use of the current and recent past topics, so that one fed the other, with opportunities to use and apply earlier skills and knowledge.
• Ensure that art, drama and music were deployed as interpretative subjects of worth and each capable of supporting the English and Maths curriculum.
• MFL, music and aspects of PE can be used to support the PPA needs of the school, by judicious use of specialists.
• Ask for teacher medium term plans, to see the direction of travel. Short term plans are for the teacher in the classroom, so can take any form that suits.
• I’d want children to know the focus for their personal efforts at any particular time.
• Create portfolios of moderated in-house examples that could support decision making in the school, be used to moderate against other school outcomes to validate judgements.
• I would have some kind of measure of capability, to support and focus decision making ability, especially of early career teachers. Every area of life is governed by a measure of capability in some form, from the kick around in the playground to academic and work achievement. “Can do” statements are a guide.

It is a consequence of the fact that there is no one size fits all approach to education that, at the tail end of a forty-plus year career, no-one has created a system that completely “works” for children from 4-18. The variables will always be the children and life itself. The shifts in the world impact on the learners, but the needs are the same; to understand the world we live in and have the skills to interrogate and explore it and communicate effectively.

Learners need interested adults to help them to interpret what they are experiencing, to give them the conceptual vocabulary that enables them to more fully participate in ongoing discussions which can allow further progress.
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Linked blogs
When Blunkett trumped education. http://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/when-blunkett-trumped-education
Are you an inclusive school? (pdf download; checklists) http://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/pdfs.html
Levelness and yearness. http://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/revisiting-if-level-ness-became-year-ness
Quality= a work in progress (and outcomes). http://chrischiversthinks.weebly.com/blog-thinking-aloud/quality-a-work-in-progress

I know I came upstairs for some reason. I can at least now claim “senior moments”.

My problem, at the moment, is that there are usually several things competing in my head for the available space, which is the lot of the freelance. For that reason, I have lists and post-its to try to keep track of the different strands. Even then, something can be missed, especially if something grabs the attention and takes over the time available. Occasionally, it’s a product of reading something on or through Twitter. These items can be tangential, but sometimes then coalesce within a variety of experiences. This time it was Nancy Gedge's article in the TES on working memory.

Life requires us to remember things. Orientating ourselves, organising our personal spaces to be able to sort, find and return items, ensuring that those necessary things are done. Many of these are held as memories, such as how to get from the house to somewhere else, while others might need a list, especially when specific items are needed from shopping. There’s little worse than getting home and finding something really important has been overlooked. Yes there is. It’s when the shopping is for someone else, especially when preparing for a special event!

As much of my working life is visiting schools to supervise trainee teachers, I have to have an ordered diary, ensure that the trainees and schools are aware of my visit and then make sure I read my diary to be in the right place at the right time. Constant rejigging of times to suit unexpected situations can put pressure on even the most organised of systems, but adaptability is essential, in life and in work.

Watching and discussing with trainee teachers is a privilege. With this being the whole of their development year, to see them move from insecure to very able is more than encouraging. From time to time they forget to do something that is written on their plan. This can be a conscious decision, based on their understanding of the learners’ needs, but it can also be an oversight. A simple piece of advice to highlight those bits of their plan that they must not forget to do or say can often be enough. Some carry a post-it in the palm of their hand. Others will develop a series of PowerPoint slides with key questions to open up like a book.

Overt modelling, where diagrams are developed from manipulatives, that then are available throughout the lesson as memory reference points can be key to supporting children with memory issues.

Success criteria for that specific activity, based on the idea of “What a Good One Looks Like”, or WAGOLL, can become a scaffold for self-checking; have you done these things? This is a task level set of expectations that provides the context for personal needs.

The need of the teacher and the children to hold onto their development needs, in Primary across a range of subjects, can be challenging. Thirty children and ten plus subjects can mean several hundred development needs or “targets”. It’s the same for Secondary. It was to support this need, to enable teacher and learners to be prompted to a specific focus, that the “exercise books as personal organisers” approach was developed in my school. Essentially these are flaps to note the continuing need. Opened out when working, the supporting adults can interact with individuals to a fine-focus need, which they might otherwise ignore in the broader need. Neither the teacher, nor the child has to hold the information in their heads.

If all Primary writing is done in a single book, a clear writing focus is maintained throughout. The process can be supported by note making, lists, recipes, etc, which can become the basis for a first draft piece of writing. Exploring the process of writing holistically enables thought processes to be developed.

For reading, an “advisory bookmark” can be created, to remind the children and any adult engaging with their reading of areas to consider while or after reading.

Providing prompts is an important part of development. Intervention in-lesson to ensure a child remains on track can enable a quality benchmark to be achieved, against which future outcomes can be compared.

Showing progress can be challenging. “Progressive benchmarking” can be a very simple means of doing this. As a class teacher, pre-NC, I would ask children, every couple of weeks to look back to their previous work and to seek to do “better” in some specific way. The NC level descriptors, appended to the edge of their books and working within the National Writing Project approaches, meant that “progressive marking” through conversation allowed me to agree that they had demonstrated an area and to append their next development goal. It showed tracking of development, the advice given and the progress made.

Personally, I’d far rather develop schema that support memory, short and longer term, than to continually feel harassed that I had forgotten something.

Teachers are under considerable pressure to show that their children are achieving at the highest possible level. Looking at the underpinning schema can be the route to stripping out unnecessary elements.

Organisation is in school and teacher hands.

I wonder how you try to keep track of these needs.

Linked blogs (click to read)
Nancy Gedge TES article
Exercise books as personal organisers
Primary writing in a single book
Advisory bookmark
National Writing Project
Organisation
1)      Planning for learning over time
2)      School organisation of time

An art exhibition is not something that suits everyone’s taste. Bobbie Bale is not a photo-representative kind of artist. She is immersive, interpretative, inventive and in touch with her inner feelings; this past few years she has been dealing with bereavement and working out her feelings in her art. It is technically of exceptional quality, her work is in a number of national collections, but can be challenging. Seeing her being challenged by someone with more traditional tastes, reminded me of Twitter spats, between “progs and trads”. That is made uncomfortable viewing for a number of other visitors, including the man’s wife, showed that the method of presenting the argument was critical, especially when the visitor chose some remarks that could be seen as personal. During the course of the day, the majority of visitors were somewhat awestruck by the works, even if they wouldn’t have the pictures on their walls. They could relate to the underlying feelings that had been captured in the images. Bobbie had found a way to communicate to them. For this one visitor, she may have needed a little more time to talk the process and the emergent outcome.
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The SEND Built-in not bolt-on conference was a chance to engage with some of the leading minds in SEND; not all, but it was a privilege to be party to a wide range of presentations and discussions. It was developed to share the thinking that had emerged from the earlier Government discussion groups about the need for SEND to be a greater part of Initial Teacher Education.

We had the “Every teacher is a teacher of SEND” statement, from Stephen Munday. I am waiting for a revision that says, “Every teacher is a teacher of children, some of whom have known difficulties, for which plans can be made initially, some of whom have issues, as yet to be identified, which may show short or long term needs, but which need to be identified and addressed within the capacity of, first, the teacher, and second within the school capacity, eventually, and in more difficult cases, involving external expertise.”

Equally, from Anita Devi, presenting on behalf of NASBTT, The National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers SEND toolkit, we had the SEND approach of assess, plan, do, review. Now, in seeking to take this for SEND, the process can ignore the fact that this approach underpins all teaching and learning, and, if it is seen as embedded in overall T&L, can be restated as refining assessment from interrogation, discussion and trying different approaches, which can be seen as the graduated approach. That a child has an observable need obliges the teacher to spot and deal with the need within their current skill base, referring to experienced colleagues as needed.
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Taking earlier time away meant that we were home for the school holiday. It took a few days to be aware of what appeared to be a campaign of blogging that daily sought to polarise and caricature one supposed extreme of the education spectrum, as a general free for all, while the other extreme was caricatured as exceedingly ordered. This extended on one day to the place of play in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum.

Sledgehammers to crack nuts?

It got a little tedious, as the methodology being deployed copied one that was visible during my training between 71 and 74, through the pamphleteer group, “The Black Papers Group”.
(Click for LINK)

The technique is simple. One member writes and publishes a pamphlet, or blog, others then write in agreement, following this up with their own pamphlets (blogs) which cite the original pamphlet. Despite this, often being nothing more than a recycling of opinion, by appearing regularly and then being quoted in the newspapers or in political speeches, it becomes something of a “truth”. In many ways the Brexit campaign on 2016 was a mirror image of distorted half-truths being repeated endlessly and is already visible in the first days after an election has been called.

That it sways opinion is evident.

It is sad that it devalues discussion, especially when one side seeks to state what the other side stands for in ways that are nothing more than caricatures.

For the 32 years of my school based career, I worked across a wide spectrum of schools, starting in secondary, then a succession of through primaries, or separate junior and first/infant schools, covering the 4-16 age range. Looking back, 24 years were spent in open-plan or semi-open plan schools; eight as a class teacher, 16 as a head (teaching). These were very successful years, both as a teacher and as a head.

​Underpinning success was considerable organisation, impacting on the classroom and the whole school. This was supported by good communication, across all categories of staff. There was a singular ethos, well understood by staff, children and parents. Success could be argued from SATs results, but also from continuous reports from receiving schools and parents of children’s pursuance of further success.

By mentioning open-plan organisation, some readers will have immediately surmised that it had something of the Summerhill or William Tyndale about it. Visitors were very surprised at how quiet the school was, even with children actively engaged on tasks. 240 children can make little noise. The order and organisation was remarked upon and disseminated across the local area.

Teachers, and I include myself in this, did a lot of DI, direct instruction, or “invited” celebrity voices to do so, through the IWB. For example if David Attenborough had an appropriate series on the TV, this might be used to offer image insights and specialist vocabulary. Other subjects had similar supportive resources, selected by the school subject managers, in conjunction with the County inspectorate. Images and artefacts were regular features of teaching, as were visits to special places, such as museums and galleries, or off-site environments.

Talk was valued highly. This may the point where a purist might wish to part company, but I’d be surprised, as dialogue, reportage, questioning at different levels, feedback and guidance have always been a part of a good teaching repertoire.

Teaching is, at heart, getting ideas across to an audience that we organise into a class. The narrative has to be ordered, organised and presented in an appropriate vocabulary/register, making links with earlier experience to strengthen understanding. It may require a variety of models to be drawn, or exemplified through concrete apparatus, to ensure deeper understanding. We have a habit, in this country, of withdrawing concrete apparatus too early, when it should be kept available to support deeper conceptualisation, eg Dienes blocks to show decimal values.

A high quality teacher will be scanning the class for tell-tale signs that there may be some confusion, as the learning bit may not be visible apart from externalisation in some form. That Dylan Wiliam now calls this reflective-reactive teaching, not just AfL, to me, is important, as the reflective part might include clarification questions to individuals, with some requiring additional in-lesson intervention or adaptation.

Learning may be more difficult to define, as it is invisible as a process and reliant on outward signs, such as verbal or physical outcomes. Some now call these "proxies".

Tasking, beyond the information sharing, should be appropriately challenging, across all abilities. Different challenges for different needs have been staples of my thinking since 1971. Children can be solution finders from an early age using “learned” skills and knowledge; they respond to challenge, can learn to order and organise themselves, with different levels of independence, as long as classrooms are ordered and organised with appropriate resources. They can also articulate when they are “stuck” and need support or guidance.

By providing challenge, then unpicking the various processes that led to success provides insights to all learners about how to think through to solutions. That, to me, is the means to “challenging up”, not just having a mantra of “high standards”. It’s a case of know-how with show-how.

The idea of thinking about thinking has been a part of my practice since the 70s. Now given the name metacognition, it has always been important, to me, that children should be active processers, not just passive receivers of information. That can only really be achieved with children as active participants in their learning journeys. That you can’t see learning is another truism, but you can see the outward displays that indicate that activity is being pursued, which might require closer scrutiny to see the detail. This is one reason why I think in-lesson interactions are so important, to provide the basis for ongoing teacher reflection about next steps.

My slightly tongue in cheek assessment guide, “get it, got it, good”, explored the need for interaction and decision making. If a group “got it” and others didn’t, then the next lesson might start with different demands for the two groups, with a checking task for some, while review teaching might be appropriate for the others.

I want teachers to have the right to choose the best approach for any particular situation, based on their (rapid) rationalisation of the needs. That, to me, should be the basis of every decision in every classroom.

As a head, if a teacher could tell me the reason why a particular approach was happening, that was fine. Why be dogmatic? It’s very illuminating when the rationale is weak, such as, “It won’t hurt them to go over this again…”

A quick anecdote.

The topic for a period of time was sports, as it was an Olympic year.

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. TAs had not yet been invented; this was an independent task.

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 measureable 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.

During day three of this experience, the school was visited by the chief County Inspector and the new school Attached Inspector, as “they were passing”. The golf course was in full spate and prompted discussion. I was able to point out the wide range of skills and learning embedded in the activity, which was part of a longer term project. This was accepted.

I’d go back to my earlier point. All good teaching is based on order and organisation.

The use of flexibilities within each lesson is likely to be down to teacher awareness, experience and expertise in any particular subject. If all the children can only go at the pace of the teacher, the teacher can be the cause of many not learning, slowing the whole. Letting go can allow some children to make learning steps that can be used as exemplars for others; the whole becomes greater than the parts.
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And this is likely to be the significant point of difference.

Investigative incrementalist

A huge amount of energy is currently being expended by groups on social media, using the written word, often through a series of 140 character tweets, to seek to score points over those they see as “opponents”. The sadness, to me, is that they are all, supposedly, on the side of educating children, seeking the maximum progress for each child for whom they are responsible.

It’s interesting seeing those who seek to identify as “traditionalist” seek to portray those that they would call “progressives” as having a laissez-faire attitude to all things learning, recycling the myth of Summerhill or William Tyndale-style education onto anyone who seeks to argue differently.

Sadly, I am of an age where my educational experience is now getting to the sixty year mark, as a pupil, then as a teacher. My Primary education, in the 1950s, would have been seen as traditional. Classes of 45 children with one teacher. In those days, one lesson for all was the norm, but, if you finished early, you were likely to be sent to the book corner, or to the art table to do some kind of time-filling activity, while the others had enough time to catch up, or not. I spent many happy days outside with Janet and John, having done my maths or English with time to spare.

I started teaching in 1974, with classes for several years that were close to 40, with no TA and no technology; even a single tape recorder was a luxury. Resources were very limited, not least by the relatively small budgets available to schools to by consumables. Conkers, buttons, pebbles and shells acted as counting materials.

An interesting side to the traditional/progressive debate today is that class sizes are significantly smaller, TAs are a regular support feature and resources, including technology are available to support every conceivable need that is identified. Whether the latter elements are used to best effect can be debated.

The curriculum has been a constant talking point, throughout my career, from Schools Council publications, through the 1987 National Curriculum, and the various incarnations thereafter.

One feature throughout my career has been the centrality of knowledge. Although this might have been less obvious to some, as topic headings might have been apparently non-specific, eg settlements, they were premised on the acquisition of information that would support a variety of activities that sought to embed this knowledge in longer term memory. The use and application of knowledge, in itself, acts as a form of test situation, where an engaged teacher can see, from verbal, written or diagrammatic outcomes, what children have secured over time. And yes, from time to time, tests were used, to look at specific elements.

Undertaking a secondment to the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) looking at science investigation approaches with children, allowed considerable insights into children’s thought processes within an investigation, as the participants were encouraged to articulate their thinking through a problem.

I have taught in schools that have had a traditional slant and some that would have been seen as more progressive, even becoming head of an open-plan school…

In almost every setting, securing the maximum of progress in outcomes across all children has been a feature, and, to be honest, where this was compromised by top-down dictat of pedagogies, I left the school early, as I felt abused as a teacher, unable to deal with potentially significant needs appropriately.

Progress was premised on ordered and organised planning approaches that ensured the coverage required; it also embed a natural linearity of delivery, for any pedagogy.

In every situation, specific lessons would start with teacher input, to ensure that every child had a baseline of essential information; sometimes developing into the “three part lesson”. Dialogue, questioning, enabling articulation of thinking was necessary feedback to the teacher. It was important to know that children were secure before moving on.

In other lessons, children might be peeled away to specific tasks that allowed for some, independent challenges to use/apply knowledge, while others might have a greater scaffolded approach. When there’s only you and a class, using independence is an essential good.

Continuous tasks supported elements of independence. For example, a story might be developed over a whole day, a week, or a fortnight, within a National Writing Project approach of drafting, edition and redrafting before presentation. Art and DT tasking would also be longer term, capable of being returned to if time was created by early finishing of a singular task.

The freedoms of earlier education were available simply because fewer elements were so rigidly timetabled. Moving to the hall for PE and music/dance/drama, or the field for games were the main, immovable chunks. There was time to allow a child or children to have an extra ten minutes after play to finish one piece of work properly, before starting the next. Or if one task finished early, moving onto the next was sensible.

Fitting always purposeful tasks into a set period of time may actually mean, for some children, that they either finish early and have to fill time, or do not finish, so, either way, are regularly frustrated, or frustrating to the teacher.  

The underlying planning from 1990-2006 for my school, and as examples for the previous two, can be seen in this blog. Planning was a strong feature of the school, supported by what we called “Topic Specifications”. These are now being called “Knowledge Organisers”, but do similar things; stating the essential aspects to be covered. Every teacher had a file for their year group which they could organise in any order that they wished; some were particularly skilful in coordinating several topics into one theme. Our topic lasted as long as they needed, from one week to perhaps four or five. This flexibility allowed appropriate coverage and access to a broad curriculum.

Elements of my approach to school could be seen, by an outsider, as traditional. The difference was probably in the way in which children who struggled with learning, as presented in the regular input, were accommodated. Where there was a need to revisit an idea, this would be done, if necessary using a different resource or model. If this was unsuccessful, further adaptation might be tried, at each stage noting the working and thinking methodologies and outcomes. It was a constant state of investigating, in order to start making incremental improvements, from which the child might find a personal motivation for taking on the learning, rather than it being external exhortation to succeed.

Perhaps that’s the main difference between some teachers. Some are more presentational than others, while some are prepared to go deeper into investigation of pupil needs. But, and it is a big but, the need to be investigative, as a teacher, can be inferred from teacher standards 2, 6 and 5; getting progress and outcomes through engagement, advice and adaptation to needs. It is easy to make assumptions about children and learning. It is better to develop the skills of investigation, but also to be sufficiently humble, to ask colleagues for time to reflect, think and plan alternative methods.

I don’t like extremes. The trad-prog “debate is at best an irritation, at worst it is potentially destructive over time.

We encourage bright, creative, young people to become teachers. They bring with them enthusiasm and investigative potential that earlier cohorts would envy; just read a few blogs from newer teachers. If we tie them to a delivery model, we are effectively recreating aspects of the 1950/60s where radio or television lessons brought an “expert” into the classroom. Using the IWB, with centralised teachers and classroom behaviour monitors would not be my preferred methodology, but it could be seen as a natural progression, should pedagogy become more prescribed.

Thinking through challenge is an engaging activity. We need classrooms where high quality thinking, and dialogue within and across subjects is enabled and led by high quality thinking communicators.

Thinking, dialogue and investigation support all approaches and enable incremental improvement…   

It can appear, almost daily, that experienced teachers, on social media, bemoan some aspect of Initial Teacher Training. This can be behaviour management, planning, subject knowledge, working with parents, progress and outcomes or assessment.

Recently there has been some discussion on SEND; special educational needs and disabilities. It is almost as if a trainee teacher has to emerge from their period of training fully equipped for every eventuality that they will encounter, at least in their early career. It is important to view ITE as just that, an initial period of training. This has to be continued through a teacher’s career, with independent self-developing behaviours supported by schools.

From the list above, apart from certain elements of working with parents and generic national Curriculum directed subject knowledge, there is every likelihood that other aspects will be different in systematic terms in every school. The variability of the training context is likely to result in very different experiences for trainees.

It is the fact that every school is subtly, or sometimes significantly, different that has caused me to reflect on the role of the school and the professional mentor as a major factor in a trainee’s success or otherwise.

Today’s mentor is more likely to be an in-house tutor than just an experienced teacher with the skills to model good practice to an observer, but selected by the head as “their turn” to have a student. Most ITE providers offer training to mentors, including to Masters’ level. They need to be able to coach the trainee in every aspect of development as a professional teacher, ensuring that every one of the teacher standards is embedded into the teacher-to-be in a form that enables them to reflect and refine their practice in ways that benefit the children.

Where trainees struggle, it is usually because the mentor, often a member of SLT, or with specific responsibilities in a school, is pulled to other roles during a school experience, so that the trainee receives too little modelling of practice, support and guidance as well as challenge and reflective dialogue. While it is a truism, regularly expressed by trainees, that they valued the time when the mentor left the room, the need for in-lesson and post-lesson coaching discussions cannot be over-stressed.

There is also the question of the general context. Schools volunteer to take trainees and, as long as they have no significant weaknesses, universities often then place a trainee. From time to time, this does not work, so a trainee is moved. 

The school SENCo may, or may not, not be experienced, and have undergone SENCo training, so that the internal systems may not always be sufficiently mature to allow the trainee to anticipate significant support.

From the training provider, the ITE trainee receives a variation on the following thinking toolkit as a starting point.

1)      An understanding of child development across the subject range and abilities within the school setting; Primary age 4-11. This is the bedrock of all decisions, impacting on all classroom practices. This is summarised in two blogs.
24652 revisited
Build a Teacher; Structuralist to holistic

Teacher standard 2; progress and outcomes. Standard 4; planning. Standard 6; assessment. Standard 5; adaptation to evident need. The developmental continuum 24652 may well show up anomalies from specific children. These are the points for analysis and further refinement of challenge supporting investigation.

It is an area where significant collaborative work would be beneficial to teachers at every stage in their development. A very good understanding of the potential range of capabilities and an ability to frame expectations of the children in a specific year group or class is central to offering challenge and the potential for progress.

2)      An understanding of approaches to behaviour management and an ability to accommodate to the contextual demands of that school’s specific approach.
Behaviour management and ITE

3)      Understanding the SEND regulations, as per the 2014 framework.
The 2014 SEN framework

4)      An understanding that some children in any classroom will display individual needs that are outside the general range of class needs, or perhaps specific to a subject or context.
Individual needs
Individual needs; fine tuning

5)      They need to understand the need to keep careful records that may ultimately build into a case study that will add value to an application for additional support.
SEN Radio?
SEND Building an individual case study.

6)      And all this within a team ethic that starts with teacher, parent and child, extends to the broader school expertise, then supplemented with external expertise. Understanding a graduated approach.
SEND Tic-Tac-Toe

7)      Having a set of descriptors of learning and social behaviours and outcomes that might, over time suggest a pattern of need that can ultimately be categorised by an external expert, following the creation of a case study.
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The school offers the real life opportunity to put this background thinking into practice. Trainee inexperience can mean an extended period of getting to know the nuances of the school system, which can be compromised by lack of shared time with an experienced mentor, or SENCo. The structural elements have to be considered within the whole. Systems understanding is an essential precursor to more holistic elements.

As an experienced Link Tutor, I am always concerned, after a couple of weeks of the school experience to unpick how well the trainee knows the children, as a class and as individuals. A level of security suggests that the practice will progress positively, as the trainee is beginning to show holistic thinking. Those still seeking to put the structures together cause more concern.

Colleagues at Winchester University have developed a ten week module for SEND that is a significant part of year 3 of the undergraduate course. This covers the above and also specifics of different identified needs. This module occurs directly before the final school experience, during which the trainee has to create a case study of one child chose with the support of the mentor and SENCo.

Learning needs are explored and described using a variety of criteria; social backgrounds unpicked with staff (teacher, SENCo, ELSA-emotional literacy support assistant) and parents through interview; discussions with children, where appropriate, underpin descriptors. Trainees have to seek to understand the needs of one child in detail. At the same time, they need to be acutely aware of the range of other needs in the class. This is particularly the case when trainees choose to do their final school experience in a special school environment.

Issues will always arise and can happen to anyone: -

Teacher standards 8, 7&1

Poor understanding of systems; schools are rapidly becoming single entities. Transfer between schools or changing year group within a school can cause concern. Dialogue and mentoring may be needed in self-organisation based on school systems, or sharing of information between colleagues, to enable deeper understanding of a child’s personal needs.
Class behaviour; understanding the school system, interpreting it into the practice of the class, ensuring that it is followed efficiently, and followed through where this is necessary. Involving senior colleagues as needed. Running a good classroom is key to every aspect of learner success.
Professional Relationships; getting on with colleagues, at all levels, is sometimes taken for granted. It’s easy to take this to an extreme and cause a tension, which can easily become exaggerated. Sometimes needs a quiet word, or, in severe situations, SLT intervention. Parent relations is a skill that is refined through experience, but there can occasionally be parents whose approach can be more challenging. Understanding is a key element of professionalism.  

Teacher standards 3 & 4

Being ordered and organised would seem to be needed as second nature in teachers, but cannot be taken for granted. Planning over different time-scales, resourcing appropriately, deploying available staff to predetermined need, are fundamental.
Subject knowledge appropriate to the needs of age and ability range of the children can be a variable, especially in Primary education, where the individual interest and expertise may vary considerably, but needs to be addressed.

Teacher standard 6&5

Responsive, analytical skill and the ability to adapt to evident need can be some of the last skills to be refined. It may well be evident between lessons, based on the relatively simple view of “They got it, or not; what’s next?” It is the in-lesson interactions, coaching, guidance and timely feedback, with, for some children a tweak down or up in the challenge to enable them to underscore some or additional progress.

Teacher standard 2
Progress and outcomes may be the last on this list, but it is the spine of every decision that a teacher makes. Going back to the 24652 dynamic, standard 2 is likely to encompass the teacher expectations, which, in turn, drives challenge, interaction and then expected outcome.

Getting teaching and learning right is a multi-layered and multifaceted reflective process. It is dynamic and ever-changing, permanently challenging.
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Trainees need to start this process in training, then keep reflecting, with colleague dialogue and support, to refine their thinking, organisation and professional decision-making.

Or choices and consequences.

Resilience, to me, is the seeking of solutions to problems that are put before you, harnessing all the available knowledge, your own and from other sources, developing a plan of action, carrying it out, with in-action alterations to evident need, leading to an outcome that can then be evaluated, and if necessary remediated or refined following further reflection. Sometimes it is reflective, at other times it is reactive, dependent on the time constraints.

From my personal story, I think I have some insight into the potential for life to throw things at you. I am also well aware that some people have had greater things to cope with than me. For all the challenges I am content with my lot, not least because I survived them and also because each contributed to overcoming the subsequent issues as they arose and made me into the person that I have become.

Life offers challenges, opportunities and experiences at different levels to each and every one of us, unless we live in a self-contained bubble and don’t participate.
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It is something of a truism that children today don’t enjoy the same freedoms which my generation did, to explore the surrounding area without worry, to play together, or climb trees, until caught, in a local recreation ground. I walked the couple of kilometres or so to school aged 5, crossing roads by myself, having been taken on the first few days by one of my parents. These experiences developed personal capabilities and a certain amount of self-reliance.

If children are not able to experience the world through their own eyes and through their own decisions, but have to rely on an adult to make the decisions for them, they can become somewhat disabled in their growing experiences. We want our children to be safe and secure and I do remember the first time my own children went off on their own into town, a kilometre away, in the days before mobile phones. That they went, got back safely and wanted to talk about what they had done in the interim was a rite of passage. Their confidence raised our confidence as parents. They had demonstrated their capability and independence in decision making. They took responsibility and grew as a result.

Regularly, we hear that about the need for “lessons” in “grit and resilience”. In a school system that has almost systematically embedded a spoon feeding culture, how will it be done?
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Put children out on wet days without a coat, to see how it feels to be cold and wet? Deprive them of food for an extended time to experience hunger? Or will we see more cross-country running, or some other physical exertion, until children feel real physical exhaustion?

If they are given “Ladybird” or “Blue Peter” instruction (here’s one I made earlier, copy the recipe), how do they learn to make decisions and take account of resultant outcomes? They won’t always have a teacher or adult around to make the decisions for them. Because, in reality, grit, determination and resilience are internalised, personal to each and every one of us. Some have more than others. This can be our ability to tolerate discomfort or pain, in different forms, mental or physical. We sometimes don’t know what we can endure until we are tested.

Independent decision making is a part of this process; making appropriate choices when faced with a problem. Working together as a team can sometimes be problematic, requiring understanding of others, but success, as a result of collaboration, can be the source of personal growth. Life is after all a glorified team work exercise. Getting on with someone can be testing, at times.

Thinking back to my active teaching days, which extended through headship, my aim was always to harness and develop independence in learners, with children thinking, talking, decision-making and enacting their plans an integral part of as many learning challenges as possible.

My classroom organisation, some would occasionally have described as a “learning workshop”, enabled challenge such as “Make a picture to represent autumn” or “What’s the best material to wrap a parcel in the post?” This would allow children choices of materials, composition and the direction of their working together, as they always made such pictures in twos or threes, so decisions were corporate. Elements of other subject challenges were treated in the same way, because the talk, planning and decision were effectively “tests”, enabling children to demonstrate how much of the taught curriculum they had internalised.

As someone is likely to be asking if teaching occurred, the answer is a resounding yes, with the tasking checking that the teaching had been embedded, and remediated within the task as necessary.

Children will not become resilient through dictated lessons, which can then just become exhortations to finish the activity. Making learning challenges such that effort across a range of capabilities is needed, over time, so that grit, resilience and decisions are in-built, might just offer a greater chance of success.

Then again, life might already have given some of the children their life-time’s quota of resilience. Imagine a refugee child, who has had to flee conflict. School does not often mirror real life, so is not always a preparation for those things that might be encountered.

You just need to know them well, teach them well, support, guide and mentor to need and challenge appropriately, letting the cords loosen from time to time, to test their security.

Deconstruction of Walderton farmhouse

When Shakin’ Stevens sang “Ain’t gonna need this house no longer, ain’t gonna need this house no more, ain’t got time to fix the shingles, ain’t got time to fix the floor”, he obviously hadn’t met with the people who run the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton, near Chichester. Their mission is to save old houses that otherwise would become derelict and their historical heritage lost.
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These houses are painstakingly taken apart, marked, measured and mapped, so that they can be repaired as necessary and then put back together in such a way that they are accessible to a very large number of visitors during each year. The team also reconstructs buildings of archaeological interest, recently building a Saxon Hall from evidence of a 950AD structure from Steyning in West Sussex.

​When my children were young, being naturally inquisitive, they regularly asked “What does that word say?” The response was the whole word, with perhaps a side order of sharing the first letter sound. Children want to understand the world around them, and awareness of words is a significant part of that. For deconstructing, in current parlance, read decoding, the new orthodoxy. Young children don’t necessarily want to know that “Road” says “R-OA-D”, or worse “R-O-A D”; or perhaps try “Crescent”. They want the word, perhaps because they are also naturally seeking meaning, to make sense of the world. That they are aware that a written road name “says” something is a step to note, in itself?

I have already said that I can see great benefit in deconstructing to determine the parts that can then be put back together. A large number of words conform to rules according to how letters are linked together; equally, there are many that don’t. Listening to children read who are over-reliant on decoding can be a painful business, especially if this is their approach to each word. Reading requires some fluency, to enable sentences to create an overall meaning, which, in turn, requires retention of whole words, or significant chunks of words that allow rapid construction of the less secure parts.

To my analytical mind, deconstruction (decoding) leads to reconstruction (encoding), then to retention, for rapid retrieval when required in context, by definition the reconstructed word, in memory becomes a (recognised on) sight word, a form of word matching.

I can remember the pleasure of playing with words, within “word families”. Having learned a simple word like “at” beginning to add letters to make additional words: - bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, tat, vat, or “it”: - bit, fit, git, hit, kit, lit, mit(ten), nit, pit, sit, tit, wit. Coupled with learning nursery rhymes and simple songs, words like this and the idea of rhyming allowed children to be explorers of words.

I have worried about the potential for approaches advocated since 1997, with the National Strategies and Assessing Pupil Progress (APP), that the curriculum, as a whole has become disjointed through deconstruction, requiring the learner to make sense of large parts of the journey, without a clear picture of where everything fits; a bit like trying to make a complicated jigsaw without sight of the picture.

I made this point, in this way, to Lord Dearing at a local curriculum review conference, because teachers were finding themselves in a similar position. The current curriculum approach has an even greater feel of an incomplete jigsaw. In fact, at times, it feels like someone decided to throw the bits out and ask people to find them first; not much fun playing an incomplete game.

A lack of overall narrative, or breadth of knowledge and understanding, allows smaller elements that are in place to assume greater prominence than each perhaps should have, as busy teachers seek to cement some simplicities into the complexities of the curriculum demand. Some schools seek to simplify further by giving some subjects greater prominence at the expense of others, diminishing the conceptual and vocabulary base.

Much mention has been made recently of the need to memorise, thoughts in working memory leading to storage in long term memory, with the potential for cognitive overload and dissonance thrown in for good measure.

There is the idea that the current simplicity ensures no cognitive overload, that working memory is only put to a particular use and that this is then stored and retained, for easy recovery when needed.
If only life and learning were that simple, we’d have been doing that forever. The narrative of sharing ideas with learners often leads, in the telling, to the leader making links with other ideas, some of which are aroused in memory simply in the telling, a link having been made by the use of a word, or seeing something in an image that jogs a thought. These tangents can sometimes be seen as new insights, which arise as much within discourse as in “deep reflection”.
This, for me, is one reason why teachers need to be excellent storytellers and children need to talk their ideas, in discussion with an adult, who can offer appropriate additional linked asides that add value to the retelling.

We don’t know the capacity of a child’s working memory, nor do we have any idea about their long term mental organisation, but we can assume that these will vary. Unless there is very good modelling of ideas in a framework that makes sense to the child, they will be struggling cognitively. As an adult, if you have been in a lecture and found an idea interesting or challenging and spent time reflecting on that, is that at the expense of the next few minutes of the talk? I know that I have, probably on many occasions.

Learning can be hard.
The problem, for a learner, in a deconstructed environment, where they have no clear map or picture, nor signposts to how things link together, is that they then have to try to put things together for themselves. It is not surprising if many find this very challenging; some may be experiencing working memory or cognitive overload or, in extremis, stress.
It can be made even harder if it isn’t articulately presented and effectively scaffolded, through appropriate concrete and visual modelling and examples that encapsulate the concepts that are embedded within the subject specific vocabulary and processes being espoused.

Learning is often hidden in the language used.
The teacher is, at times, an interpreter, even in a home language, where extended vocabulary needs to have a developmental relationship to earlier forms. This may be specific within subjects, but needs unpicking if gaps in learner understanding are to be bridged.
 
Deconstruction, without reconstruction, leads inevitably to gaps, as bits are not picked up and put back into place. If the gaps are in the teacher element, it’s not surprising if the learner demonstrates those gaps.
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Put your learning jigsaw together with clarity, share the overall picture, then unpick the pieces as they become relevant during the journey.
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Walderton farmhouse, reconstructed.

According to a report today, paraphrased by Icing on the Cake aka @JackMarwood on Twitter as
To paraphrase a report today, "Since 2012 pupils from high-income families have made more progress year-on-year than poorer classmates".

If this is, indeed an accurate summary, I began to speculate why this may be the case.

We are in a very strange economic period, with many people working in low paid jobs, more than likely renting in a market where costs appear to be rising significantly annually.

Where people are working in reasonably well paid jobs and may well have started to purchase a house, their mortgage rate is significantly lower than at any point that I can remember. Unless this has led them to borrow too highly, the repayments could still be manageable. I may not be alone in remembering when mortgage interest was at 15%. even on a relatively small mortgage, it meant pulling back on unnecessary spending. It was the point where my wife and I became vegetarian; half a kilo of pulses cost significantly less than half a kilo of meat.

In both cases, additional personal debts, through bank loans or credit cards may also be a drain on finances.

To me, a significant factor will always be the amount of disposable income, for discretionary spending, after all bills have been paid, with consequent decisions that are made as to how it will be spent or saved. It’s whether other demands, like children needing shoes, or other clothes, or perhaps replacing a specific piece of household machinery need to be considered first.

How does this impact on social mobility? I’d pose the view that children from better off families have greater access to social activities that cost money and fall within discretionary spending; sports and other activities, in and out of school, visits to places of interest, museums and galleries, with entry and transport costs. They may well share more social gatherings. They may also have greater access to personal ownership of books and other elements that aid learning, such as wifi and computer links.

Each of these opportunities provides valuable opportunity to talk within a family or a social group, generating a greater social vocabulary and to develop social awareness and confidence. It broadens their view of the world, of possibility and aspiration. If you have never had sufficient money to make decisions that can appear to be frittering it on fripperies, you’re likely to hold back in some way, a form of self-limiting.

It is for all these reasons that schools need to be aware of their communities, to make appropriate decisions to offer opportunity to address some embedded deprivation. It is easy for schools to espouse a “high expectation” mantra, but it is also a case for having high expectations of the school and the teachers to broaden horizons, open eyes to the potential around them and to harness the community, including parents, to support the children for whom they have joint responsibility to educate, formally and informally.

Why does London appear to do better that other areas? I’d suggest that free transport for children and relatively easy access to free world class galleries, museums and other culturally rich experiences is likely to have a part to play; something that might be unthinkable in other areas. I recall a trip to a Redruth (Cornwall) school, where teachers were aware of children who had not visited the sea, four miles away, purely because of transport costs.

​I could see a strong argument for a part of Pupil Premium moneys being allocated to providing social learning opportunity outside of the school experience, to address elements of the inequality, providing experiences that enhance formal school situations.

Social inequality? We have inequality in disposable income, but possibly also inequality of awareness. It's not the children at fault for being born into poorer families. It might be argued that it is a state responsibility to address the issues arising.  

That plays a significant part in a child accessing social experience, which, in turn becomes debilitating socially. Poverty creates poverty of opportunity.
 

Much of my working life is spent working alongside developing teachers, at different stages in their careers. In 2012, the Teacher Standards changed, from 33 statements to 8 headings. It still surprises me that, after nearly four and a half years, many teachers still cannot identify all eight standards, even though they are supposedly working within them each day.

However, in my developmental roles, they can be very interesting, as it is possible to play with permutations of the standards that exemplify what it means to become a complete teacher, especially during university or School Direct (short) experiences. There is much to be learned and this often has to be learned and adapted in the context of the school experience, which can cause tensions, with performance needs as well as personal developmental needs.

For information, the eight standards are
1)      Expectations
2)      Progress and Outcomes
3)      Subject Knowledge
4)      Planning
5)      Adaptation
6)      Assessment
7)      Behaviour management
8)      Professionalism

Plus there’s a part 2, which describes further the professional standing of a teacher within the broader community.

Behind these headings are many lines of exemplary materials. Click to link to pdf download, with a shortened version.

However, the headings are quite useful, in themselves, as supports for a narrative that seeks to describe teachers in development.

Presenter

34 – Not necessarily the ultimate age for a teacher, but this could describe, say, a wildlife expert, or similar, who knows their stuff and can put it across in a clear narrative to an audience, using age appropriate vocabulary and language structures. The chances are that children in the audience are with parents taking control of behaviours. To some extent, it also describes some television presenter approaches, as they can take for granted that their core audience is watching. If they are also looking at a mobile phone, making a cup of tea, or are in any other way distracted, it’s not their problem.

873 – A person of professional standing, who has the skills to control an allocated group, for a period of time, who can be trusted to get across some subject knowledge in an ordered manner. This could be used to describe a teaching assistant, or other adult whom a head deems appropriate to lead an activity.
They can work within any prescribed approach to behaviour, dealing with issues that arise appropriately.

Structuralist approach; a trainee still making sense of the organisational needs.

8731 – Having appropriate expectations of behaviour and learning (TS1) raises the expectations of the adult, as the conduit through which some level of progress in a subject area might be accomplished.
It is often the case that these standards are the first and easiest to be evidenced for a trainee teacher, as, by and large, they describe the personal, professional persona of the adult, who knows their subject and can organise a classroom to get information across in a coherent form over time.

It is also likely to describe a teacher confident in their professionalism and ability to get what they know across to a range of school audiences, within an overall planning approach. See the diagram above.

​The limiting factor from this point is embedded in standard 2, progress and outcomes; in other words, how well are the children known and how well does the adult understand the learning outcomes appropriate to different year groups?

Holistic approach

432-65-2 - You’d want the person described above to have a wider range of skills, to include 432, being able to organise their subject over different timescales, so that the subject requirements were built up appropriately and checked on the way, with the intention that children should embark on a journey towards an expected point, with the teacher aware of the whole journey and the significant checkpoints on the way, as well as the final destination.

It can depend on how you define children making progress (TS2) and how you determine whether they have. If the definition is coverage leading to a test for memory, it might, in inexperienced hands, preclude analysis of the needs of specific individuals (TS6), leading to further engagement with them, undertaking adapted approaches (TS5).
 
Interaction with learners, engaging with the ongoing learning and making subtle or more significant alterations to the expectations of some, responding to evidence within the classroom, TS6&5, are probably the key to ultimate teacher success, in that it is the sum total of progress of each child (TS2) in a class or cohort, that ultimately is the signal that the school is doing well be every child, whatever their needs.

Teacher standard 2 also covers the full range of needs likely to be encountered. If, for example, a teacher has experience limited to one year group, as can happen in some organisations, knowledge of achievement in years above or below enhance and extend the outcome knowledge base, enabling the teacher to make more nuanced decisions about challenge and intervention needs. Mentoring and moderation are key elements in this area, to allow the less experienced teacher to benefit from the wisdom of more experienced colleagues.

Teacher standard 2 is also the area that is currently causing concern, in looking at assessment and tracking needs for teachers. It’s the one area where experience provides the basis for personal development, in making accurate judgements about children as learners, leading to better planning, interaction and adaptation; TS 465. The bottom line question; “How well, breadth and depth, can you show that you know your children?”

It takes time, and is a stage in a progressive development, based on analytical reflection, from reading and first-hand experiences on behalf of the developing teacher. Self-development is a constituent of teacher standard 8; developing yourself into the best possible professional, as a team player and a team leader, is key to long term success in teaching.

Teaching, in many ways, is an investigative role, based on an original hypothesis that the planning is pitched at the right level, with in-lesson evidence showing the need to alter course, or to provide additional scaffolds to support individuals.

Thinking takes time and that can be a rare commodity in a busy school room. So it is incumbent on each teacher, especially trainees, to make best use of available time to think and talk about the role. It is a job where it can be difficult to switch off, too.

Many will use holidays as time to catch up on thinking. As a head, I often thought of the job as 24/7/365. Perhaps that contributes to both success and burn-out?

That’s something else to think about… Be well.