8. How can I get homework handed in consistently?

“I done it!”

Is homework helpful? The debate is polarised: Ofsted say it is, whereas the cover of Alfie Kohn’s book speaks for itself – homework doesn’t work:

After lots of experiments, most of which backfired spectacularly, including naively making it voluntary and getting precisely zero pieces of work in, I’ve discovered that the golden rule of getting homework handed in consistently is this: make it an automatic routine.

If it’s automatic, it’s easy. The routine helps them: it’s easy to remember and easy to do. Routine also helps you: it’s easy to check, and easy to track who’s not done it.

If it changes sporadically, it makes your life – and your students’ – hell.

So why make your life and theirs harder than it needs to be?

For instance, if you see a class twice a week in English, Monday is learning spellings, Thursday is writing two paragraphs on the question of the week:

Simply give them 10 words to learn that are tricky to spell and test them next lesson.

Then, get them to write 2 paragraphs on a question you’ve been considering that week, and next week get them to read each other’s answers.

Just make sure that each week, you set the same type of homework on a particular day, due to be handed in on a regular day of the week, until they’ve got it on autopilot.

7. What theory of learning will tell me how to teach?

   

 “There’s nothing as practical as a good theory”

‘Cryptic, remote, irrelevant and unusable’: it seemed to us, one term in to Teach First, just as it seemed to the much more experienced Tom Bennett, that practical theories in education were hard to come by. Theories of ZPD (zone of proximal development) and multiple intelligences (from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal) left us with more confusion than clarity.

Over our first year, only one theory has had practical applications that improved our teaching.

Cognitive science explains how the mind learns, and on that basis recommends how to teach. Its basic tenet is this: minimise working memory overload to maximise long term memory retention.

So here are our six killer apps of cognitivism in education, not just for maths, or only for English, but across all subjects.

The six killer apps of cognitive science

1. Chunks 

Insight: Our working memories are very small (try memorising ‘4687538279201’), but our long-term memories are very powerful, chunking stored information (now try ‘the boy got home’): abstract concepts (like metaphors and ordinal scales) are hard to understand.

Application: Don’t overload your lessons and learning objectives with abstract concepts and complex problems: choose the key question to provoke curiosity, chunk it into very simple tasks and build it up in little bits.

Examples: Instead of ‘by the end of this lesson, students will be able to understand how different dramatic techniques convey action, character, atmosphere and tension’, use: ‘How does the play create tension?’

2. Knowledge

Insight: It’s impossible toimprove the skills of reading, critical thinkingand problem-solving without content-specific facts and background knowledge.

Application: Consolidate students’ knowledge foundation securelybeforeyou require higher-order thinking.

Examples: Secure the times tables in Maths, and grammar in English, for instance.

3. Problems 

Insight: What makes things interesting to learn and easy to understand is clarifying the problems to be solved.

Application: Focus first on the question or problem type, and the why, before diving into how to solve it. Let students compare and revisit problem types that you’ve covered before, to deepen their understanding.

Examples: Compare lots of GCSE question types in English and Maths.

4. Examples

Insight: Asking students to figure it out for themselves is less effective than showing them how to do what you’re asking, with lots of examples.

Application: Create lots of worked examples so students know how to improve.

Examples: Show lots of model paragraphs in English, and show them lots of step-by-step working in Maths, for instance, how to factorise a quadratic expression.

 

 5. Practice

Insight: It’s impossible to become proficient at any mental task without extended practice.

Application: Drill students in the crucial processes they need to succeed.

Examples: In English, identifying techniques and punctuating sentences, in Maths, manipulating algebra equations and converting between fractions, decimals and percentages.

 6. Mnemonics

Insight: Long-term memory storage and retention works best when triggered by chunking.

Application: Createpowerfulmnemonic devices with acronyms for complex, important processes that students need to be able to do.

Examples: Maths teachers have long used SOHCAHTOA for trigonometry; English teachers have used PEEL for textual analysis. Create your own: try ‘SEAL the DEAL’ for comparative writing (Similarity Examples Analyse Link; Difference etc).

Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? is a good place to start exploring these ideas.

6. What’s the best book to read on teaching?

In my first year of Teach First, top contenders have been Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and Steven Farr’s Teaching as Leadership. Both are worth reading, and both reward continual re-reading. They take bronze and silver medals.

             

But gold goes to Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, for three reasons.

First, it’s packed full of practical ideas. If you want to know how to improve the way you use stories, knowledge or problems, examples, practice or mnemonics, there’s no better author.

Second, it distills three decades of scientific research into how the brain works. Thirty years of evidence is crystalised at your fingertips: all of it tailored to the classroom.

Third, it opens your eyes as to why certain things aren’t working. For instance, why don’t they remember anything I tell them? Because I’m starving them of stories and mnemonics that make content memorable. Why can’t they understand the concepts? Because I’ve starved them of concrete examples. Why can’t they interpret critically? Because they don’t have a sufficiently secure foundation of background knowledge of the text. Willingham’s brilliant diagnosis sheds light onto why students struggle at school.

Above any other book I’ve read on teaching, it holds the keys that unlock learning.

5. What’s the secret to assessing pupil progress every lesson?

 

Use exit tickets to get a snapshot of what every student took away from your lesson

This is the single most powerful thing I’ve done all year, from lesson one, maintaining it consistently, and it’s impressed external observers and internal mentors alike.

The exit ticket provides a snapshot of whole class understanding for each and every lesson, in under two minutes.  For effort to impact ratio, they’re a no brainer.  I can’t even imagine planning the next lesson without them.

How do I set it up?

5-10 minutes before the end of a lesson, throw up a single question on the board (sometimes you might want two, but be careful about going over this – really ups the workload!)  They write their name and answer on the ticket.  As they leave, they hand it to you.  This does two things:

1. They have to leave via you, establishing you as an authority in the room
2. Gives you a powerful tool for planning/tweaking the next lesson

What do I do with my fistful of tickets?

It’s up to you, experiment.  Here a few possibilities:

Light touch – Flick through quickly and organise them into piles:

1. 100% correct
2. Didn’t have a clue
3. Different piles for the same mistake

It’s an immediate picture of their understanding.  I might modify and redeliver an entire lesson if the results are bad.  Now throw them away.

More time, more impact – After arranging the tickets into piles, mark them; tick everything that’s correct (for motivation), circle errors and comment if you can, maybe even providing a model solution.  Next lesson hand them out and discuss the misconceptions on the board.  This has the (significant) advantage of making sure they know you value their effort, and you’re doing something with all those tickets.  Now they can throw them away themselves.

Maximal effort, good for Ofsted – At the end of the lesson, they write the question in their books. Sort the tickets into piles again, mark them and hand them out in the next lesson, but this time they glue the tickets into their books, maintaining a record of their end of lesson understanding.

They can be used to assess student’s feelings as well – how confident they understood the lesson, how well they feel they met a behaviour objective etc.  This is a good way of showing you value student voice.

5. How can I mark books without burning out?

Appetising stuff?

 

Use icons to set targets, save time and help them improve.

 

Imagine you have five classes of thirty students, who you teach three times a week. Marking their books is the bane of every English teacher’s life. To mark every student’s book each week, it means correcting about 300 pages a week.

One simple solution helps: use icons to set targets. Set aside five hours a week to marking books: that hour each weekday after school is the most powerful time you spend as a teacher. No other teacher marks books this often. If you do, you’ll instantly win every student’s respect. ‘How do you do it?!’ they’ll ask admiringly…

Most marking is high effort, low impact. Teachers spend hours poring over books in the first few weeks, laboriously writing out personal comments. They quickly burn out, and struggle to keep up with even marking every two weeks.

The problem with this for students is that it doesn’t help them improve. Comments take too long to arrive, they’ve forgotten what they wrote two weeks ago, and they can’t act on the advice.

Instead, what would maximum impact, minimum effort marking look like?

Don’t write out comments. You end up writing such similar comments across the class, and they won’t read them anyway.

Instead, get them to write them out. Choose three to five targets or questions before you start marking, then scan their answer, choose the best fit between the student’s work and the group target, and draw an icon. One minute per book maximum. At the start of the next lesson, you write the targets on the board, students write their targets in their books. They get instant feedback and can take action on their target straight away.

Simple. It saves you time and helps them improve.

4. Entering my classroom, what do students do now?

Set up a crystal clear routine and step-by-step instructions on the board that tell them unmistakably: ‘This is what you do now.’

The eager arrive before lunch has finished; the cool saunter in with ridiculous swagger; the obnoxious drag their feet all the way to your door; the complacent roll in late.

Your classroom will fill in dribs and drabs; you need to get them settled and ready to learn as quickly as possible.

At its heart, the Do Now is simply what they should do, now they are in the room.  Think of the Do Now as a settler, and then have another starter designed as a hook to your lesson.

I’ve experimented with many variants over the year.  Here are a few of them:

Simple Questions

• Simple maths questions based on the last lesson’s learning
• Simple maths questions that will lead into today’s learning

Bigger Questions

• ‘If this is the answer, what is the question’ – can be as simple as a big 42 on the board
• ‘Where have you seen maths in real life’ – e.g. percentages
• Draw a triangle on the board – what questions might I ask about this triangle?
• What would the world be like without numbers?

They’ll all have different effects, and you’ll have to experiment with your own groups to see how they respond.  I can’t tell you what will settle your classes best, but I can tell you this: having had to repeatedly circulate a room frantically, persuading all but the hardest working to open their books and start answering questions, the first time I saw a whole group (of Year 10s) walk in and just get on with it was when I wrote three, crystal clear instructions on the board, started an 8 minute countdown timer, welcomed most at the door, then calmly kicked back in my chair, taking care of some admin:

1. Rule off after yesterday’s work
2. Write today’s date
3. Attempt these questions in your book

4. What’s the best way to start lessons?

Nothing beats a great start

    

Silent reading settles them; quiz-show games hook them.

Thirty boisterous teenagers bowl through the classroom door for your second ever lesson, some bantering, some sidling, others snarling.  Brandon is refusing to take his coat off; Haydon is still scoffing his Twix and glugging his Coke; two pupils you don’t even recognise are chasing each other round the room; one of them is shouting that he’s in your class from now on. How did it go so wrong so quickly?!

Now here’s a strange fact: by this time next year, you will have taught over 700 lessons.  You’ll quickly realise that how well they start is a pretty good guide to how well they go. So how can you begin them in the best possible way?

Consider your aim. Is it to settle or to startle? Calm and curiosity are both important ingredients of appetising lessons.

Personally, I’ve found a two-pronged attack works best: settle them first, hook them after. If they’re not calm they can’t learn. Especially after lunch, teenagers’ afternoon energy is fuelled by a toxic cocktail of fizzy drinks and sugary snacks. But if they’re not interested they’ll disrupt your lesson.

In English, silent reading has a powerful calming effect. The whole class is focused, for ten minutes, on a book of their choice that they bring in. It requires no preparation. They learn to love it. You get much-needed space to do the register, check homework, log in, set up your slides, or write the objective on the whiteboard. It also stretches their concentration span. Modelling reading in front of them works like magic: if you don’t do this, they’ll get unsettled; If you do, as if by magic, they settle well. Book presentations, where every lesson one pupils shares why they’d recommend their book, are a good follow-up.

For a fun recap, quiz-show games spark lessons into life. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Countdown, the Weakest Link and Blockbuster combine music and visuals, competition and spectacle, beat-the-clock time pressure and audience interaction, testing knowledge and earning prizes.

In short, calm them down, then hook them in. 

3. What are the best teaching resources for maths?

Make heavy use of the pre-prepared questions and solutions from the Mathematics Enhancement Programme, to quickly prep lessons

“Don’t try to reinvent the wheel!”

“Look on TES!”

Two oft spoken quotes that aren’t very helpful.  There are limitless maths resources out there, some terrible, some will change your life.

As a maths teacher much of your lessons must necessarily revolve around setting the students questions to practice, and then telling them the answers.  Okay, there are many variants on this model, but practice certainly sits at the core of strong learning.

Creating all your own problems, and solving them, and differentiating them, enough to keep 30 students engaged for 30-40 minutes of practice per lesson, is mentally exhausting.  Don’t try to reinvent the wheel; many people have already produced exactly what you need.  But… where is this wheel, what does it look like?  TES is huge, and mostly filled with what you don’t need.

I want to show you the wheel.

Voila, the Wheel:

One resource, which will potentially change your life.

The Mathematics Enhancement Programme (MEP), produced by the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics (CIMT) back in 1995.

You’ll probably hear a lot of talk about the Standards Units during the SI.  They really are great resources, and they’ll get you thinking about maths in new ways, but they have two major caveats that may not be mentioned:

1. They are far from exhaustive – They are about deepening understanding of core mathematical ideas, not covering curriculum content (which is your first and foremost responsibility)
2. They are utterly inaccessible to pupils who haven’t first been taught the basics in a more traditional manner

So how do you teach those basic concepts?  Enter, the MEP!

The MEP is an exhaustive repository of the best traditional teaching resources I have seen.  There is far more content than can be delivered, so I recommend focussing on the ‘Pupil Practice Book’ for each module.

Exceptionally well structured sequences of work, that will help *you* as a new teacher understand how students can set out their working.  Each sub-topic in the practice book includes the facts and processes they need to understand, followed by 2-4 worked examples, followed by well-structured rote practice questions, followed by more interesting worded questions, followed ultimately by more complex relational questions.

If that weren’t enough, look at the other resources for each module to find mental tests you can use as starters, what they call ‘Activities’, which are often investigative resources for deepening understanding, extra practice questions if needed, and diagnostic tests to assess their progress.  There’s even a ‘Teacher Notes’ resource for each module, that usually gives some information on the history of the mathematics, and a little real world context, or some well written maths-lovin’ paragraphs that you can throw up on the board to help inspire your students.

Find them at one of these two links (use whichever you find easier to navigate):

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6075946

http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/default.htm

3. What are the best learning resources?

Google images, YouTube videos and iPhone apps light up lessons

Two sources, more than any others, will save you time in planning, captivate your classes and make your life easier in lessons.

 

Youtube videos and Google images. Free, plentiful, easily searchable, and exponentially expanding, these are possibly the most untapped resources available to all teachers.

                                          

Why are they so untapped? Possibly, it’s because most teachers don’t know how to make the most of them. This blog post shows you how – in two simple steps.

 

Find the spark

Whatever content you are teaching, there will be an image or a video that links to or sparks off from it. The trick is to be imaginative. As an English teacher, reading skills can be introduced by using a video of BBC’s Sherlock: how is reading like detective work? Teaching any biography works well with trailers: for example, try The Colour of Freedom on Mandela. Persuasive writing? How does Eminem win over the crowd in the 8 Mile rap battle? Moving on to Shakespeare? Film companies have done the hard work for you with trailers, brilliantly combining visual pyrotechnics, virtuoso music, visceral sound effects, the best language and key themes. Multimedia module or creative stories? Try The Guardian’s Three Little Pigs adaptation. The beauty is, it takes just 5-10 minutes to find the best three options.  The only limit is your imagination.

 

Ask for questions

Choosing is the easy part. But how can you use them in class? The best way is to get the class to generate their own questions. Ask routinely: ‘What do you want to ask?’ Distilling the best questions – and asking why they work – sharpens their skills of enquiry.

 

I’ve found that a lesson that starts with a powerful audio-visual stimulus often captures the attention of the toughest teenage audiences.

 

There’s an app for that…

Lastly, here’s a resource I designed to give students a snapshot of the big picture. Display the English curriculum visually as apps on an iPhone. Whenever you start a lesson, the learning aim can show the apps you want them to focus on – for example, reading and questioning. Choose your own apps – I chose focusing, remembering, questioning and coaching.

 

 

2. How do I plan maths lessons and not look like this?

Quickly get to grips with all the problem types in the maths curriculum

You can teach:

1. A fact
2. A process
3. A specific problem solution

You can guide them towards deep understanding, but that’s another ball game.

Examples

1. Facts:
   1. Angles in a triangle sum to 180
   2. Angles in a quadrilateral sum to 360
   3. Angles on a straight line sum to 180
2. Processes:
   1. Find missing angles in polygons by summing the angles you know, and subtracting the total from the angle sum of the shape
   2. Find the angle sum of any polygon by subtracting 2 from its number of sides, and then multiplying by 180
3. Problems: Take a look at the example problems below:

1)  2) 

3)

4)

5) 

The facts and processes involved in finding the missing angles are pretty much the same each time, but the problems and their solutions become increasingly complex.  Pupils understand ‘maths’ in terms of what questions they’re being asked to solve.  Focus on one problem and show them how to solve it.  Try a few examples together, then let them practice.

Introducing a slightly more complex problem can be a good way of challenging brighter students, but don’t be shocked (…you will be) when you find often even the most able can’t go from problem 2 to problem 3 without support; the fact that it looks different is enough to shut down most minds.

Building those kinds of thinking skills in pupils is a long term goal.  In your first term, it’s important they experience success, so they believe they can learn something from you (they *do* want to, even if they say they don’t care).

Before you start, you need to very quickly get your head around the curriculum in terms of facts, processes and problem types that pupils need to know.

For most facts and processes, levelled/graded, see these maps and curriculum overview  (there are still a few omissions and minor errors in the layout; they’re a work in progress):

For problem types… that’s a tougher one.  Look at as many GCSE past papers as you can get your hands on, ask colleagues, see what the MEP (Mathematics Enhancement Programme – post with more detail here) has, Peter Bland has an exceptional catalogue of (higher) past papers and focus booklets here.

In summary

To plan a simple, bread and butter lesson in 20-30 minutes:

1. Decide what problems you want to teach and copy paste some from the MEP resources
2. Create some example problems where you can model exactly how you want them to set working out in their books
3. A better lesson will have something upfront that asks the question ‘why’ this maths might be needed, and helps explain