Around 6 months ago, I was asked to deliver a CPD session to
my school about effective revision strategies to help pupils remember,
following my pupil’s ability to recall large amounts of information being noted
in a SLT lesson observation.
I was a bit nervous about how an NQT would be perceived delivering a session like this but was pleased to have some insight that would hopefully help my colleagues. What made me able to (hopefully!) add some value in the session was that I had engaged with educational research right from the beginning of my teaching career.
Not for the first time I had reason to be grateful to Teach
First for giving me the building blocks to be a research-informed teacher right
from the start, a process that started right from Summer Institute.
What I found was that whilst this certainly did not stop me
making mistakes, it meant that when I was reflecting on my teaching I had an
idea about where to go to read more about how to improve my practice. I thought
I would go through 3 areas that I tried to develop over my first year in
teaching and what is incredible is that the seeds of all this were planted in
those incredible 6 weeks.
1) The importance of explicit instruction
I have previously blogged about the absolute car crash of my
first ever discovery-based lesson. Shortly after that lesson, I went
back to the materials I downloaded during SI and re-read the seminal work by
Sweller et al on why minimal guided instruction is not effective and started to
consider how I could alter my teaching to ensure learning was more effective.
Often I read teachers speaking about their first few years
being a failed experiment in enquiry based learning but thanks to the grounding
in research that Teach First gave me I was able to start making changes to my
practice within weeks.
I then recalled discussing Rosenshine’s principles of
instruction during SI which I re-read (and 6 months later supplemented by
reading Tom Sherrington’s excellent book detailing examples of how these could
be implemented) to give me a model of how this explicit instruction can be delivered
effectively to ultimately lead to pupils completing successive independent
work.
More recently, I have been reading more around clarity of
instruction reading Adam Boxer’s book around the importance of examples and non-examples,
dual coding and Pritesh’s recent blog series on a similar topic (including going
from concrete to abstract concepts that I previously discussed). There is still
a long way for me to make my instruction more effective, but I will always be
grateful to Teach First for setting me off on that journey.
2) Understanding how memory works
As I started to implement this, I then grew concerned that
some pupils just weren’t taking in what I was teaching and those that were seemed
to quickly forget. During SI, we were introduced to the concept of working and
long term memory and I quickly started to reflect that I was overloading my
pupils with too much information.
From this, I read Daniel Willingham’s excellent summation of
what cognitive science can tell teachers (that we were introduced to in SI) and
was able to start thinking about how I could chunk up learning and focus
learning so their working memory was being focussed on what I wanted them to
learn. I spoke more about how I’ve gradually tried to implement the idea that ‘memoryis the residue of thought’ earlier.
During Summer Institute, we were introduced to the Learning
Scientists ‘6 strategies for effective learning’ which meant that I already had
an understanding of the importance of things like retrieval practice, spaced
learning and interleaving to strengthen pupils ability to recall information.
From this foundation, I could build my understanding on this reading Kate Jones’
book on retrieval teaching, Pooja Agarwal’s book on powerful teaching and the
Learning Scientists own podcasts.
I strongly suspect it would have been years into my teaching
career before I effectively utilised these techniques had it not been that
introduction to cognitive science that I got from Teach First.
3) Assessing pupils
Like a lot of new teachers, I spent significant parts of my
first year drowning in marking without ever feeling that I was really understanding
where my pupils were struggling to understand or how they could improve. I
certainly wasn’t responding to data I was getting in the classroom during
lessons.
We had been introduced to the principle of Formative Assessment
and encouraged to read ‘inside the black box’ by Dylan Wiliam in our own time
at SI. During the heat wave of July 2018 and with lots of new trainees to socialise
that was an invitation I politely declined but later, reading work on formative
assessment and how to respond to this from Dylan Wiliam, Daisy Christodoulou,
Doug Lemov and Tom Sherrington had a significant impact on how I was able to respond
to my pupils needs in the classroom to ensure faster progress.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding about formative assessment
but this reading and the foundation that Teach First gave me helped me navigate
away from these.
I’ve just started reading Carl Hendrick and Paul Kirschner’s
book ‘How Learning Happens’ summarising 28 pieces of educational research. There’s
still a lot to read and implement over the years to continue to improve my
practice, but it is incredible how many of the findings from these papers we
were first introduced to in those 6 weeks and I will be forever grateful to Teach
First to making sure their participants were research-informed right from the
start.