she said “it really stuck in my head that you once noticed that I was overwhelmed and took me out of the class… to tell me that I needn’t be so worried and needn’t finish my homework for you so that I could rest. Most year eights would probably love a night off of homework, to be fair, but you noticed that I needed that, and I did.”
The most important thing, for me, when designing any of these activities is to think about what I’m trying to find out, what the misconceptions might be, and what I will do when I’ve found out what students know (or don’t know).
Resolutions? I think they are worthwhile: they help us to change the status quo of our teaching. But to make them workable and long-term, they shouldn’t be radical overhauls (marginal gains).They need to be straightforward (but effective) so that you can make them habits, rather than just intentions.
The confidence measures for individual classes are useful for informing immediate planning, but I also want to understand which of the concepts are more difficult to understand and retain.
So I grouped scores from each class together for every concept tested. I also tabulated how many correct/ incorrect answers there were for each question, to ensure that it gives a similar picture to the confidence measures.
“What’s going on with your dive, Niki?”
Verbal feedback.
He could have written this down for me to read later. If he did, I might have wondered exactly what it was that I’d done wrong. How come my dive had fallen apart so dramatically? I was actually feeling quite good!
Luckily, it wasn’t written down.
I have been guilty in the past of associating copious amounts of green pen with effective feedback and progress. Surely, the more I write on work, the more feedback I provide, the more progress will be made next time? The students shall be impressed by the quantity of my marking, and absorb my words of wisdom like a sponge, deploying them next time and making leaps and bounds of progress.
Growth mindset has a ring of truth to it, but will require organisational change as well as changes to classroom practice. We don’t want Growth mindset to end up on the pile of discarded educational fads. We plan to take things slowly, look for evidence of positive impact, and work on improving our own mindsets before lamenting a lack of resilience in the students in our care.
This week, I’ve been covering ionic bonding and structure with year 11. This is an important topic, and the concepts within it form the basis of many key ideas in future modules, so I have been thinking about how best to help them understand and retain these fundamental (threshold) concepts.
Students need to feel there is a “point” to all this, especially when you ask them to feed back to you about how things are going (and if they have any questions for you). It’s therefore very important to take the time to answer any questions they ask, and to show that you have taken account of their feedback.
For example, at the end of an online homework, I asked pupils to tell me about aspects of the current topic that they found most difficult. In the following lesson, I displayed some (anonymised) representative responses on the board, and went through key points with the class.
I now have a list of “tricky concepts” or perhaps “key concepts” (I wouldn’t call them all threshold concepts), which I will add to as I teach this year.
My next step is to plan these concepts into lesson sequences and teach them explicitly, then revisit them, spacing and interleaving them among other topics/ concepts.
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