*I originally started planning this post for Staffrm over two years ago but never published it. Since restarting my blogging habit here I’ve gone back and forth with this one and, if I’m honest, I’m still not happy with it. In the end, I decided that I wanted to put it out there and see what happened. I know that engagement is a dividing term so let's hear your thoughts!*
Engagement. A word that draws passionate responses in the microcosm that is the Twitter-verse. If Tweeters are to be believed, engagement is one of two things: it is either vital for learning and those who do not engage children will not help children learn to love learning OR it is a dirty word that is used to make excuses for bad behaviour and make teachers do things that do not help promote learning. Ok, so that’s a over generalisation of the spectrum of opinion you’ll really find but it is representative of the tribalistic nature that social media at times. In 2013, Professor Rob Coe wrote about poor proxies for learning. Students being busy and students being engaged are the first two on this list. Just because pupils are engaged, it doesn’t mean they are learning (nor does it mean that they aren’t, just that we can’t assume that learning is happening because these conditions are met). What does that look like in a classroom? I believe that engagement is necessary but not sufficient. Pupils must be engaged with their work to learn from it; however, this is not the same as pupils being on the edge of their seat constantly, waiting for the next bang and whistle. Pupils can be engaged in quiet, reflective, challenging deliberate practice. Pupils can be engaged in improving their footwork to beat an opposition player one on one. Or pupils can be engaged in making a Roman shield. The question becomes: what do you want your pupils to learn? What are they practicing? What aspects of their footwork do they need to improve? What is it about the Romans that you want your pupils to learn? What is it that you want them to remember? And here lies the problem. A carefully designed opportunity for deliberate practice, combined with well thought out explanations and modelled examples will help pupils to understand, apply and recall an idea. It can help pupils practice the things that they need to store in long term memory. But, if the activity encourages pupils to think about something other than what you want them to remember, they may be engaged but they won’t be learning effectively. Pupils will remember what they are thinking about so if they are mostly thinking about the pattern on their Roman shield then that is what they’ll remember. If they are mainly thinking about the ways in which they can attach the handle to their shield then that is what they will remember most (Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School articulates this much more effectively than I could hope to. If you haven’t already, I thoroughly recommend you read this book). Now that is not to say that what they are thinking about MIGHT have a valuable place in their learning but it is not necessarily what you want them to learn. As we said earlier, engagement is necessary but not sufficient. Clare Sealy wrote a great blog about teaching for memory, distinguishing between episodic and semantic memory. I recommend it as a great resource for understanding why ‘fun’ experiences don’t necessarily lead to great academic learning but we ‘remember’ them so fondly. Now I'm not saying that lessons shouldn't be fun or engaging. Having fun in lessons is a happy bi-product: it should not be the actual goal of teaching. Yes, pupils will learn more in a happy environment but it does not follow that we should engage in edu-tainment.
Outstanding?
A quick visit to teaching groups on Facebook will reveal regular requests from teachers asking for ideas for an outstanding lesson, normally because they have a lesson observation approaching. Many teachers, I believe fall into this trap, especially in the early stages of their career. I know I did (ok, not by asking on social media but by preparing more for lesson observations). To an extent, this is human nature; we want to do particularly well when someone is watching. It is also a symptom of the high stakes observation culture which was prevalent until recently (and still is in places. Personally, I’m much more in favour of low stakes regular coaching to support staff). OFSTED have moved away from the idea of grading individual lessons due to the lack of reliability in judgements between observers. With this said, teachers are still looking for outstanding lessons and I think a big problem with this is that the individual period is not an effective unit of time for learning (I think I first heard phrasing like this from Kris Boulton on the Mr Barton Maths podcast but I’m not honestly sure…if anyone knows an accurate source I would love to make this more accurate). Learning takes place over time but generally teachers think about individual lessons rather than a sequence of lessons. When we think of learning in terms of individual lessons (especially when we know we are going to be observed), we are more likely to think about how we are going to engage our pupils, except engagement can often be confused for entertainment. For me outstanding teaching is great teaching, where pupils learn lots and have the opportunity to practice and apply what they know, over a period of time. An ongoing conversation Following recent developments on edu-twitter, spats and arguments about traditional vs progressive (the old chestnut that doesn't seem to go away) and Sean Harford leaving the platform, I've seen lots of tweets about the need to avoid a two-camps approach. This got me thinking about the term 'engagement' again. It still evokes strong feelings, emotions and opinions. Although this blog is far from perfect, although I keep wanting to tweak, change and rewrite it, I keep coming back to the one line: engagement is necessary but not sufficient.
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Free resources
This said, I've still tried to use KOs in my practice, particularly over the last four years. These are a work in progress and link to the curriculum I was teaching at the time I created each of these. They may not fit perfectly for your school and your context; however, it seemed a waste for these resources to sit on my computer after they were no longer being used in my classroom so here they are. You will find links to all the Knowledge Organisers I have made thus far on the resources page of this website. They are all available (many of them including retrieval quizzes too) for FREE via my TES page. If you find them useful, please let me know...and if you don't, well then let me know how you think they could be improved. Please share them with any colleagues as you can - I want these to remain helpful to others. Remember, sharing is caring! Why must we always reinvent the wheel? If you'd like to know more about why Knowledge Organisers can so powerful and how they are best used (if at all), I'd recommend starting with the following blogs from Joe Kirby, Jon Hutchinson, Michael Tidd & Jon Hutchinson (this time for Teach Wire). If you don't have the time to read these blogs now, here are a couple of key takeaways:
Final tangents As I've been writing this blog post, I've found myself going off on a few tangents that really aren't specific to KOs but are definitely worth looking into. I'm not ready to write a post on each of these right now and others have already written eloquently about them elsewhere but I didn't want to completely delete them either so here are the highlights:
As a profession, we teachers seem to love reinventing the wheel and, particularly as I was training and in my NQT year, this frustrated me. Even more experienced teachers of 10, 20 years in the profession, who can pull out an old resource or plan from their files, seemed to be constantly needing to resource their lessons from scratch. To make matters worse, several schools I've come across seem to be anti-text book and/or anti-worksheet meaning teachers can feel like they need to create all their questions from scratch even for pupils to practice basic skills. I know this was certainly my experience.
Surely there were great resources out there that were tried and tested? Indeed there are but (I'm going to let you in on a big secret here, are you ready?) the internet is a very big place and finding quality resources can take time, especially when you're new. Which is why when Joe Kirby wrote about renewable resources a few years ago it was an idea that immediately gripped me. So, when a colleague of mind brought back a maths basic skills worksheet from a trip to Shanghai, it sparked an idea. The aim of these sheets was to ensure quick and automated basic skills using the four operations, comparison and representation. I knew straight away that several pupils in my class would benefit from this sort of regular, low stakes practice but I didn't want to have to create a new sheet every time I wanted them to practice these skills: if they had the same sheet too often then they could just learn the pattern of answers and it was going to be too time consuming to create a new sheet every time. I had a dilemma and needed a renewable solution. Step forward Microsoft Excel. I worked with a colleague, Anna Daubney, to create several sheets which would enable this sort of practice and generate new questions at the press of a button so that the same pattern and style of questions appeared every time but with new questions to answer. Hey-presto, we had our first renewable resource. We went on to create similar sheets for Fraction, Decimal and Percentage equivalence and for Times Tables. Over the years, we've tweaked the different sheets and I still use them when my pupils need them. If you think you may find them useful too, you can find a link to all of these on the resources tab of this site. Why reinvent the wheel? Sharing is caring!
SATS prep
For weeks leading up to SATs, Year 6 teachers up and down the country were madly prepping their pupils for end of KS2 SATs. Now that the annual week of madness has come and gone, I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit back and reflect on which strategies were most effective in preparing my pupils for the end of Key Stage assessments. I don't know about you, but one of my most common frustrations when pupils complete tests (in any year group) is the unnecessary, avoidable errors that they make on questions you KNOW they can do; the sort of mistakes that you know pupils will kick themselves about when you go through the answers with them. But sometimes something magical happens...when pupils are asked to spot errors in someone else's work, it's all so simple. I decided to try this with my own class in the lead up to our end of year assessments. The pupils were each given a completed SATs script with many errors based on common misconceptions and errors... "Is this really Year 6 work?" one girl asked me. "Was this person even paying attention? This is so easy!" muttered another pupil. When the magic happens Yep, the moment they became the marker, rather than the test taker, the pupils could more easily identify and correct mistakes in arithmetic, they could identify a misconception in grammar and they could understand where others had gone wrong in that tricky reasoning problem. And the best bit? They could do it WITHOUT needing the mark scheme. I know this all sounds a little too good to be true; it isn't always quite the land of milk and honey I might have just described. Some pupils still didn't get it all and others struggled to work at the pace they would need to during the real thing. This isn't a fix-all solution. But the magical part is that just by reversing the roles, pupils were spotting mistakes they had been making for months. "Oh I get it now!" and "Yep, I make this mistake all the time," followed by furious scribbling of the correct answer, a response in the marking box and a brief explanation about what the pupil may have done wrong. For the purposes of this trial run, I allowed pupils to work together, in pairs or small groups, if they got stuck. They were encouraged to come and speak with me if necessary and use all the usual classroom resources whilst I worked with lower attaining students to help build their confidence in the marking progress. And they were HOOKED! Solid grounding Now, at this point I feel like it is important to make one thing clear: all of this is only possible if the pupil has a solid enough understanding of the concepts the question is testing in the first place. If they don't know understand, if they don't already have a good grounding in the key ideas and processes then just becoming the marker isn't going to suddenly impart the knowledge and understanding that has eluded them throughout their primary education. But the real success was that my pupils were able to identify common mistakes and errors that children throughout the country have made on these papers: mistakes that many of them would make themselves. Now that they know these mistakes, now that they have sat on the other side of the table and seen what it is like, they are less likely to make the same mistakes again (or at least I hope so - similar mistakes were certainly less prevalent in our end of year assessments). I definitely intend to re-run this in future years and not just with Year 6s. I have a strong suspicion this will be a useful exercise for pupils throughout KS2 and would love to hear from others who have tried anything similar in other year groups. A well-rounded education Of course, SATs are not (should not) be the be all and end all. Yes, it's important that children do well but only as part of a well rounded education. Doing well in SATs should be a happy bi-product of a good primary education, not the goal. We should set pupils up to succeed in the next stage of their education, thinking carefully about where the curriculum journey takes them, and if we do this effectively then SATs results should take care of themselves. Now, I know that this is not the reality for many schools who feel the pressure of exam results, floor standards and OFSTED ratings but we can dream of a day when all schools are able to focus on planning and delivering a great curriculum so that results look after themselves because of a high quality education! If you are interested in downloading a set of completed misconception papers based on the 2017 SATs you can do so for free here. Thanks to Anna Daubney for her help in creating these! |
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