What to do after a mock: into the classroom with whole class feedback

A reflection on how to deal with whole class feedback after a mock or practice test. In summary this blog suggests you should:


Broadly, if the questions in the test reveal that there is an area of content (a domain) your students don’t know, the response isn’t to focus on those questions, but to go back to that area of content (the domain) and reteach it.

My thoughts in that post were very general and theoretical. I didn’t really go into detail about what to actually do beyond saying “go back to the domain.” In this post I want to go through what I actually do and how I marry this bit of assessment theory with the increasingly popular idea of whole class feedback (WCF). In a nutshell, WCF is a way of checking students’ work and giving them feedback but without faffing around with time consuming written comments that don’t help anybody (for more on marking, see here). You take in the students’ work, read it all, and on a sheet of paper you jot down some common problems or things you want to address, bring those up in class and expect students to amend and correct their work. Easy.

In sum then, when going over a mock or any other piece of assessed work:

1. Think hard about what the students’ responses tell you about their knowledge
2. Split your findings into two piles: “things I care about” and “things I don’t care about”
3. For things you don’t care about, either forget them or change the test for next time
4. For things you do care about, split into two piles: “for reteaching” and “for building in”
5. Reteach and build in!

The full post is much more detailed, take a look if you are able to.

https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2019/11/21/what-to-do-after-a-mock-into-the-classroom-with-whole-class-feedback/

Retrieval Practice and Bloom's Taxonomy

An interesting study into how retrieval practice can be used to bolster performance at tasks requiring higher-order thinking. The conclusions went against the usual premise that lower-order thinking is required before attempting higher-order material.

"One criticism that we have received is that retrieval practice is primarily good for fact learning, but not for higher-order learning. In other words, retrieval practice might serve rote memorization but not the ability to critically think about material or apply it. We addressed this question here and explained that facts must be sufficiently encoded in order to use those facts in a new situation. Because retrieval supports knowledge acquisition, retrieval practice of facts should therefore support application.

However, a recently published study (1) by one of our colleagues, Dr. Pooja Agarwal, examined whether retrieval practice could do more than just support the acquisition of factual information. The study was based on a common prescription for using Bloom’s taxonomy (2): students should first focus on the lower levels of the taxonomy before higher-order thinking can be accomplished. Dr. Agarwal directly compared retrieval practice with the use of lower vs. higher-order thinking to determine if the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy were indeed necessary before moving to more complex thinking. "

Full blog post here:

https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2019/6/27-1

Behaviour Management: Practical Tips

The link below is to a scan of a page from the current edition of the Impact journal from the Chartered College of Teaching. Lots of good research in this journal but this is a page of immediately practical tips.

Behaviour Management : Practical Tips

Mini TeachMeet 14

Jack and Jill : how to read a literary text through a feminist lens (FG)

FG detailed the difficulties in initially teaching a literary criticism method when pupils have a disparate range of texts and so how teaching the techniques on a text that is well-known by all pupils is a good starting point e.g., nursery rhymes.

FG detailed how this might work in practice with a variety of feminist readings of Jack and Jill followed by a recreation of the 3 Little Pigs from a Marxist perspective.

Other examples of scaffolding that might be applied in other subjects might include:
using a simple design when trying new materials initially
producing a piece of art using a simpler medium first
thinking about staging, lighting etc of a simple scene in the styles of different directors
coding using a new technique but starting with a simple problem

Link to doc: Teaching Literary Criticism

SOLO Taxonomy (VLA)

VLA detailed the SOLO taxonomy (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) and how she uses this structured higher order thinking in her lessons and signposts to pupils the level of challenge.

She uses the symbols to portray each level of the taxonomy and this is included on worksheets etc as a way of differentiating. Students choose their initial level of understanding and aim to make progress from that starting point during the lesson.

The links below were provided as resources to help embed this in lessons.

https://www.tes.com/news/30-second-briefing-what-solo-taxonomy 
http://pamhook.com/solo-taxonomy/ 

Link to VLA Presentation: SOLO Taxonomy Presentation

Testing in the Classroom: The Importance of Feedback

A blog post from 'The Learning Scientists' this week.

"Some debate exists regarding the most effective way to present testing-related feedback to students. But while each method presents practical advantages and disadvantages, one thing remains clear: test feedback can be a powerful tool for facilitating learning and combatting the negative testing effect.  When we provide feedback to our students, we effectively prioritize both assessment and learning. "

View the whole blog post here: Learning Scientists Original Blog

Every Day Challenge

Everyday challenge

https://classteaching.wordpress.com/2019/01/10/everyday-challenge/

A great blog peace from Class Teaching on every day challenge. Do read the full piece if you can on the link above, but the key strategies it goes on to discuss are:

1. Prioritise learning over performance

The reason plenaries at the end of lessons to prove to an observer that the students in the class have made progress was always a flawed measure, is that all they prove is surface learning, or performance, rather than deep learning.  Learning is mysterious, liminal and invisible. An individual lesson is the wrong unit of time over which to judge learning.  Therefore a challenging curriculum is key to challenging lessons.  It has to be Curriculum first.

2. Space it out and keep coming back

This principle also fits with one of the strategies for learning to come from cognitive science with the strongest research-evidence behind it, distributed or spaced practice.  This is the idea that if you space out your study of a principle over time you will learn it more effectively than if you learn it intensively in a short space of time.

3. Set single challenging objectives

If we are to exemplify high expectations, any objective we share with our students should set the expectation for all.  We certainly shouldn’t limit some in our class to only being about able to cope with certain aspects of the subject matter. 

4. Get them thinking hard

As Professor Coe’s first question suggests, we should plan to challenge our students as much through thought as through action.  We should plan for what we expect students to be thinking about throughout the lesson as much as what we want them to do.  As Daniel Willingham put it in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? memory is the residue of thought, therefore we need to get them thinking about the topic we are trying to communicate.  

5. Know thy subject

If we are to truly challenge our students then we need to have absolute confidence in our own base of knowledge.  Research demonstrates that a deficit in teacher subject knowledge can be a barrier to students’ achievement

6. Challenging vocabulary

A central tenet of teaching should be that we use the rich language of the subjects we teach.  We should avoid at all costs the temptation to dumb down our language for fear that using the proper terms will terrify our students.  However, if we are to successfully create a classroom rich in historical language, we need to explicitly teach this words.  

7. Set the benchmark early

Use those first few lessons with a class to set the bar of expectation high and handsome.  Show them what you believe students in your class are capable of and get them to produce something similar.  This is useful in a number of ways.  It is something you can return to throughout the year (perhaps the dark days of early January) to demonstrate what they can do when they really put their minds to it.  It also establishes where the bar is in your classroom nice and early.  We know students tend to meet the expectations we have of them so start as you mean to go on.   

8. Share excellence

Once excellence has been achieved and created, make sure it kept and shared.  It is important students understand the level you expect and that the level is achievable within the context of your classroom or department.  The aim should be to immerse them in this excellence through displays and teaching strategies. 

Reflective Questions 

• Do you plan for students to regularly get stuck and struggle in your classroom? 
• Do you have high expectations of all the students you teach?
• Is your subject knowledge strong enough to stretch your students with confidence?
• How do you ensure students retain what you teach in their long-term memories and retrieve this regularly?

Posted by Chris Runeckles

Extra reading

John Sweller, Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design, Learning and Instruction Volume 4, Issue 4, 1994

Soderstrom and Bjork, Learning Versus Performance, An Integrative Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2015, Vol 10, P176-199

John Dunlosky, Strengthening the Student Toolbox: Study Strategies to Boost Learning, American Educator 2013

Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School

Coe et al., What Makes Great Teaching?

Bringing Words to Life, Beck, McKeown and Kucan

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck