PGDE Social Subjects - newsletter 3

-

 Why can't my pupils follow simple instructions

By Adam Boxer lead practitioner at The Totteridge Academy, London, on why pupils find it hard to follow simple instructions. [The following is a lightly edited lift from Adam's original blog post]

As soon as you are a few words in the noise starts to build as students pack away, put on coats, push their chairs in and talk to each other. Why? It’s not a difficult class and you’ve had good command of the group…so why does this always seem to happen?

One of the most powerful techniques I use is Means of Participation (MOP) [read more in Lee Donaghy’s blog]. MOP is about how you communicate to students how they are supposed to participate in your lesson. Phrases like:

        "…by putting your hand up…”

        “…just think about the answer for me”

establish the means by which your students will participate. It’s a powerful technique but it isn’t enough.

The second you ask them the question, they start writing down their answer and they are no longer listening to you. It’s not a property of the instruction itself – it’s a property of its placement; where it sits in the sentence.

You need to Front Load your instructions - put your MOP at the front of your instruction, get the important information in before the point when students will stop listening

        "By putting your hand up in the air, I’d like you to tell me…

        "Without talking, I’d like you to write down three things…”

[Please, read the original, much fuller text on Adam’s blog]

The Purpose of Feedback 

The Amazon blurb for Michael Chiles' The Feedback Pendulum reads, "In the words of Bill Gates, 'We all need people who give us feedback. That's how we improve.' The art of giving feedback is widely recognised as one of the most powerful tools in education and equally one of the most variable aspects in the way it is applied".

This Education Scotland resource might be very helpful in getting you to think about your own use of feedback (the following, in italics, is taken from the ES page):

Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Dylan Wiliam's work is the emphasis on moving learners forward.

Here, Prof. Wiliam discusses the place of using assessment strategies to support high quality feedback on learning.

 In his words, “good feedback causes thinking”.

The Education Scotland resource invites you to watch the video and consider the impact of your own approach to develop the use of high quality feedback to support the best learning and teaching.

  • How do you use feedback at present to support developing best learning and teaching?
  • How would you avoid offering feedback that focuses on the ego of the learner?
  • How do you use dialogue and questioning techniques to find out where a learner is in their understanding of the tasks they are completing?
[See the original on the Education Scotland website.]

Retrieval Practice 

with Kate Jones

Retrieval practice is a strategy in which bringing information to mind enhances and boosts learning. Deliberately recalling information forces us to pull our knowledge “out” and examine what we know.

[The following is a lightly edited lift directly from Kate's website]

Image source: https://lovetoteach87.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/RP-Grace.jpeg

As the author of a book solely dedicated to retrieval practice, Kate Jones often gets asked questions by teachers, students and parents about this teaching and learning strategy.

Very handily for us, she has curated various resources connected to retrieval practice that can be useful in our professional learning and classroom practice.

Kate has included links to academic research, websites, blogs, classroom resources, videos, podcasts and online courses all linked to developing further knowledge, understanding, and implementation of retrieval practice.

 

Image source: Impact Wales

[Please be sure to visit Kate's website for more information, links and resources.]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A digital Bill of Rights (updated)

-
Image
  Have you ever taken a moment to consider what you share online?  What about all those photographs of your children? Have you even asked your child if they are happy with you sending their digital likeness into the ether, at a time when an ever-greater number of  tools  are being launched, and used, with minimal thought for their longer term impact. The  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child  was written a long time before we had any reason to worry about online presence - after all the the UNCRC came into action in 1992, a year before  CERN  placed its World Wide Web technology  in the public domain and gave birth to the phenomenon of online communication. Yet the UNCRC has incredible relevance for our children, especially given omnipresent online access and these new  AI   tools : Article 3  - The best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children. Article 8  - Every child has the right to an identity. Governments must
Read more

The case of the phantom manse...

-
Image
At a meeting yesterday, the Vice Principal shared this photo showing a large granite manse on the College Lawn.   Today, the college lawn is treated with the same reverence as the sections of the college which date back to  1525, it's funny to think the lawn has only been as it is since around WW1 (shortly before the Elphinstone Hall was built to replace the Common hall in the 1930s). As a result,  I've been enjoying a bit of digging into the History of King's (given it's now my place of work).  After a trawl through old maps on the National Library of Scotland website, I found this 1847 map ( https://maps.nls.uk/view/ 115109637 ) showing  Principal Jack's  manse in  approximately the  same location (it also names a few other academic manses from that time),  and it lines up beautifully with   https://www.electricscotland. com/history/statistical/kings. htm .    Given the timeframe, and the second document, we can safely assume that is William Jack  https://en.wikip
Read more

The Digital Water Cycle - when will the floods begin?

-
When we discuss #Sustainability, we often talk about #FoodMiles and #Renewables. When I taught my Social Studies classes, I would often ask them to think about the #SupplyChain of the lunchbox items (Farming, Transporting, Selling, Shipping, Processing, Packaging etc). But whilst we are well-versed in discussing the hidden carbon footprint of our foods, we rarely give much consideration for our tech.  For a long time, we have championed digital solutions and cloud storage as "a great way to save paper", and saving trees (especially with deforestation continuing at pace around the world) is a worthy criteria. In a meeting just last year, a Microsoft employee rejoiced telling me how M365 had saved a school so much paper, that, if stacked it would be the equivalent height as London's Shard building. Little was said of the need for energy hungry servers to store all that data - the cloud is a clever label, because we rarely think of 'clouds' as sinister. ( Although I
Read more