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

April 2018 INSET - Cognitive Load Theory

We’ve all been there. Carefully thought through a brilliant activity designed to push pupils, only to observe the resulting car crash in despair. Either pupils lack the resilience to engage with independent thought without constant teacher intervention or what little they actually end up learning requires you to spend the next lesson (time you don’t have!) re-teaching the material. In this session I’ll run through some of the most widely accepted theories of “cognitive overload” and how, if certain practices are incorporated into your teaching repertoire and SOWs at KS3 a really challenging curriculum can help pupils learn, increase pupil motivation, and also be a real joy to teach. There will also be some time to discuss ideas with colleagues and think through what it might all mean in your own subject.

Access the session resources here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=11AmimsedSvuVnqXOZt-W-qYCE267-8Cj

Teaching and Learning Books

A number of books have recently been purchased by the school library which are quite influential in Teaching and Learning at the moment.

Do take a look at these:

Mark. Plan. Teach.

With teachers' workload at record levels and teacher recruitment and retention the number one issue in education, ideas that really work and will help teachers not only survive but thrive in the classroom are in demand. Every idea in Mark. Plan. Teach. can be implemented by all primary and secondary teachers at any stage of their career and will genuinely improve practice. The ideas have been tried and tested and are supported by evidence that explains why they work, including current educational research and psychological insights from Dr Tim O'Brien, leading psychologist and Visiting Fellow at UCL Institute of Education.

Mark. Plan. Teach. will enable all teachers to maximise the impact of their teaching and, in doing so, save time, reduce workload and take back control of the classroom.

Making Good Progress

Making Good Progress? is a research-informed examination of formative assessment practices that analyses the impact Assessment for Learning has had in our classrooms. Making Good Progress? outlines practical recommendations and support that Primary and Secondary teachers can follow in order to achieve the most effective classroom-based approach to ongoing assessment. 

Written by Daisy Christodoulou, Head of Assessment at Ark Academy, Making Good Progress? offers clear, up-to-date advice to help develop and extend best practice for any teacher assessing pupils in the wake of life beyond levels.

The Learning Rainforest

The Learning Rainforest captures different elements of our understanding and experience of the art and science of teaching. It is a celebration of great teaching and the intellectual and personal rewards that it brings. It’s aimed at all teachers; busy people working in complex environments with little time to spare. The core of the book is a guide to making teaching both effective and manageable using a three-part structure: establishing conditions; building knowledge; exploring possibilities. It provides an accessible summary of key contemporary evidence-based ideas about teaching, curriculum and assessment and the debates that all teachers should be engaging in. It’s packed with strategies for making great teaching attainable in the context of real schools.

What does this look like in the classroom?

In this thorough, enlightening and comprehensive book, Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson ask 18 of today's leading educational thinkers to distill the most up-to-date research into effective classroom practice in 10 of the most important areas of teaching. The result is a fascinating manual that will benefit every single teacher in every single school, in all four corners of the globe.

Mini TeachMeet 10

1. Differentiated Starting Points (JR)

• JR shared an example of where the students choose the appropriate level of challenge for them. This is because she has students in Y7 who have had greatly differing exposure to coding already - some are brand new to it, whilst others are already quite proficient
• she notes that students are generally very good at choosing the appropriate level, but the novel approach here was in having a statement suggesting what they need to be able to do to start at each level e.g., “I can skip challenge 1 if I can …..”
• she also asks students to record why they have chosen a particular challenge and to put this in writing and this ensures they have thoughts carefully about their starting point

2. QR Codes and URL Shorteners (DO)

• A QR code (quick response code) is similar to a bar code
  
• can be scanned by any smartphone/device using built in camera apps or by specific apps
• A URL Shortening website (e.g., www.goo.gl) will reduce the length of a web link down to a manageable length i.e., https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GhPVubCBg4sWJ-2En0qKv71e56QrsvdVD_lH5ojP3UA/edit?usp=sharing becomes goo.gl/daxzGN 
• Applications for education:
• Homework feedback sheet with 4 QR codes or short URLS with links to e.g., Youtube video explaining a misconception, consolidation worksheet, extension task / material
• Link to any Google document you create by using shareable links
• Feedback – links to further online tasks, support materials or resources
• Add videos to worksheets
• Links to support material on worksheet to provide differentiation
• Links to Strive material to provide challenge on worksheets
• Students to insert into their work/projects
• Links to model solutions

Mini TeachMeet 7

1. History Memory Game (JDe)

• JDe shared an example of an interesting example from trench warfare in WWI. This was based on ‘Kim’s Game’ where students are put in groups (by ability to aid differentiation) and one student comes up at a time to view the diagram of trench warfare for 30 seconds. They returned to their group and had to describe the image to the rest of the group and one person drew what they were told. After 1 minute, they then go to the front to view the diagram and so on.
• Stretch and challenge questions would then be employed at the end of the activity
• It was noted that this would be a useful activity in many subjects. This was a very ‘accessible’ activity as you could choose to focus on labels, overall structure, small details etc.

2. Playposit.com (FD)

• FD shared a website that would be useful if a teacher were attempting a ‘Flipped Classroom’. 
• A common problem when setting students a video to watch as their homework is in knowing whether they have done it or not in preparation for the lesson.
• This website allows the teacher to insert questions into any YouTube video and track responses, thus knowing whether pupils have completed the activity.
• FD demonstrated the website and it was quite straightforward to crop videos, embed questions etc.
• At first glance, it did not seem possible to upload your own videos to the website, but it may be possible to upload videos to YouTube as ‘private’ videos and then use them.
• The marks from the questions can be imported into Google Classroom.

What do top students do differently?

Here is a video from TEDxYouth that FD has used to good effect with his Year 11 tutor group. They found its ideas very motivating.

Thinking Keys

Following the January Training Day, a colleague shared these 'Thinking Keys' and some example activities that tie in well with the material from the Lazy Teacher.

Find the full set of keys below:
Thinking Keys Presentation

Dealing with Day-to-day Differentiation

A good read from HeadGuruTeacher on differentiation here.

He acknowledges that meeting everyone's needs is hard :

The fact is that we all find it hard  – and that’s because it is; sometimes it can feel as if you’re never quite getting it right because someone or other isn’t flourishing.  As with many things in teaching, we need to aim high but we also need to be realistic, pragmatic and tolerant of imperfection in order to flourish ourselves.

But he also talks of two non-negotiables

We all have ups and downs; we can all mess things up.  We all have lessons that seem too complicated to factor in yet another level of support or challenge; we have all had lessons where behaviour issues dominate or you do more didactic input and the differentiation is less evident. However, there are always two things that I’d say are non-negotiable:

1. Neglecting the basic access entitlement of students with particular learning needs. If you have a student that can’t read the text-book or follow the standard instructions because of learning difficulties or physical impairment, you have to sort them out every time.  You need to plan for their needs every lesson and go to them immediately to make sure they know what to do.

2. Setting work that is too easy for the top end. There is nothing worse than having students waiting for others to finish with nothing to do or simply having time for a good chat because they’ve completed a basic task.  Here the solution is to set in-built extension tasks as a matter of routine. “If you finish Task A, then go straight on to Tasks B, C and D”.   Of course, there is the issue that ‘more work’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘more challenge’. It’s better if each task is increasingly difficult  and you can always consider allowing students to skip Task A and B if they feel confident to tackle other tasks straight away.   At the very least, there should always always be a ‘what next’ if the initial task is quite easy.

Check out the full post by following the link below:
https://headguruteacher.com/2014/02/01/dealing-with-day-to-day-differentiation/

Strategies to promote challenge

With a focus on differentiation, it seemed apt to find a blog post on Challenge. I like #15 here - 'Don't Round Up'. When students answer questions in class do we too often focus on the parts that are right and move on? I often tell them in what ways they are right but then ask them to improve their answer, or challenge others in the room to improve their answers.

Anyway, the post follows (source: https://pjlovingthelearning.wordpress.com/2015/02/15/strategies-to-promote-challenge/ )

The word challenge is much used in education. There can be no doubt that sufficient challenge is important and the stakes are high. Too challenging and students give up and find learning uninspiring. Too little and work becomes too easy and monotonous and little learning happens.

Here are 16 strategies that may help you to challenge students.

Much of these strategies are self explanatory or maybe even plain obvious. However, I think these three ideas in particular are all really important.

Firstly, as Willingham rightly says
‘Memory is the residue of thought’. So, strategies that make students think are essential, in my view, for challenging learning. Otherwise, we run the risk of our students being on ‘autopilot’ and therefore not learning.

Secondly, encouraging students to take risks in their learning and not worrying about failure. This is easier said than done. However, a climate of excellence, positive classroom relationships and using the ideas of Dweck’s Growth Mindsets should support this.

Thirdly, I had increasingly come to believe that questioning is one of the most essential tools in the pedagogical toolbox. Doug Lemov’s ideas in his work ‘Teach like a Champion’ really struck a chord with me. Not rounding up student answers and using probing questioning to challenge misconceptions and promote deeper thinking can be adeptly utilised by the teacher to support challenge, thinking and understanding. Crucial is not just the questions we ask but how we respond to their responses. Through increasing our own wait time by a few seconds we can ask more probing questions and foster better class discussions.

Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list. Ultimately, it’s about us, as teachers, taking that risk and really believing our students can do it. So, what if the students say ‘I can’t do it’. Great! They are being challenged. ‘You can’t do it yet’ must be our reply.

So, think about how we learnt to ride a bike when we were younger. When it happens and clicks it really is one of those ‘eureka’ moments. Yet it happens through challenge. Taking the stabilisers off, experiencing the failure and frustration of falling off and taking the risk to really really go for it. That’s what makes lessons challenging too!

What are your ideas on how to best challenge students?