RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Professor Dylan Wiliam at The Schools Network Annual Conference

Ever want a quick and simple tool to help with plenaries?

Plenaries are often the Cinderella in our lessons.  We should plan for them, but often forget, and often when we have planned one we run out of time or forget it is there.  Well this little wonder of a PowerPoint can have you up and running with wonderful plenaries with little or no planning; sounds too good to be true doesn't it? The PowerPoint is really simple; ask a student to pick a number, the number they choose links to a question and you can use this to check student learning from your lesson.  Simple!

AfL plenary resource: Pick a number

How do we keep Students on their toes?

It is always a challenging task to ensure that we keep students engaged and involved in all of our lessons and that we are on top of assessing how well each individual is accessing what we are trying to teach.  There is a lot of advice out there about how we can make those minute by minute assessments to make sure we know students are with us.  You can find lots of ideas in books such as Jim Smith’s Lazy Teacher.  However, we also have good ideas at Cheney and below Toby Lockyer has been kind enough to share his 21^st century version of lollypop sticks.  These resources can be used to support no-hands questioning and for other activities that will help keep your students on their toes.

Once again thank you Toby for your contribution.

Toby Lockyer (Maths Department) writes:

I have organised the two types (for excel and power point) of virtual lolly stick resources into a folder including working examples.

They have instructions on how they work. Their uses are very similar as for lolly sticks.

They are in: staff resources/maths/toby/Random name and prize generators (virtual lolly sticks)

If you want me to pop over for five minutes and show you them in action I’d be more than happy to.

Toby π J

G&T Learning Walk Thursday 24th November

Last week Sylvia Hawken and David Gimson did a learning walk to help us learn more about our provision for gifted and talented students.  They visited seven lessons in History (2), Geography (2), Maths (1), Art (1) and MFL (1), in Years Seven and Ten.  The Classroom Quality Standards for G&T were used as a framework for observation.  David has posted their findings below.

Positive Feedback

In all classes observed behaviour and uniform were good or very good.  There were no barriers to learning because of bad behaviour by other students:  there was a positive learning ethos and the great majority of learners, including G&T learners, were fully engaged in the work and often inspired or challenged.  We recorded a very large number of positive student comments.  G&T students were reflective about their own learning and sometimes aware of what they could be doing to challenge themselves further beyond the classroom (e.g. by further reading).  G&T students were aware of how their learning linked to real world issues.  In most cases they seemed in charge of their own learning.  Quite detailed subject specific vocabulary, skills and knowledge were being developed.  We saw skilful teacher questioning (including some very well thought-through questions) and dynamic interactive teaching.  There was some detailed summative assessment, and staff who we questioned were clearly aware of where their students were at.  It was very inspiring to see teachers at work. 

Points for Reflection

Several of the classes we saw had large numbers in quite small rooms; a couple in particular also had very wide ranges of ability.  This is bound to have some impact on the student experience. 

Some students felt they wanted a bit more ongoing feedback about where they were at – not necessarily in the form of marking.  We saw slightly less evidence, overall, of formative than of summative assessment.   While most students felt they had clearly moved up a gear from primary school or Year Nine, a couple said that they were repeating things they had already done before and were asking for more challenge.  In one case a student had attended special classes at a previous school and now felt that he was treading water (while the other seven students questioned in the class all felt they were being appropriately challenged).  In Year Ten we identified three male students who are underperforming (for reasons unrelated to individual subjects) and we plan to follow up separately with actions to support/engage them. 

Thank you very much indeed to colleagues who welcomed us to their classes.