January 2020 INSET - 6 Bases of Power - Winning Hearts and Minds

Winning Hearts and Minds - The 6-bases of power (EAM)
Reflecting on how we generate influence with different stakeholders (e.g. pupils, colleagues, parents, etc).


We are all always trying to influence people through our interactions and relationships. The workshop will investigate the strategies and tactics that people often use to try and persuade others.

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January 2020 INSET - SOLO Taxonomy

SOLO Taxonomy (VLB)
What is SOLO taxonomy? SOLO stands for "structure of the observed learning outcome". It is an approach designed by educational psychologists John Biggs and Kevin Collis to scaffold higher-order thinking for pupils. It’s all about increasing the levels of complexity in tasks as pupils move through their learning. Think of it as a kind of do-it-yourself differentiation for students. In this session we will explore how to incorporate SOLO in to lessons.

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January 2020 INSET - Higher Order Thinking in STEM

Higher Order Thinking in STEM (JCD & JLi)

Some concrete examples of encouraging higher order thinking skills from mathematics and the sciences. Maybe you are a STEM teacher who wants to hear more from your colleagues or perhaps you want to hear about how STEM approaches this to inform your own teaching in another subject.

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January 2020 INSET - Game for Subject-Specific Vocabulary

A Game for Subject-Specific Vocabulary (ABr)
How to make use of a simple game in order to improve the use of subject-specific vocabulary. The game can be adapted to cover all levels of the thinking skills hierarchy but I will be specifically looking at the HOTS using this game.

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January 2020 INSET - Assessment for Learning

(Re)introducing Assessment for Learning (DO)
Certainly a ‘buzz-phrase’ in the early 2000s, Assessment for Learning is still a powerful approach to teaching and learning that underpins a lot of the good practice that is seen around the Schools. A quick (re)introduction followed by some takeaway ideas for how to incorporate this into your classroom teaching.

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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