My Diminishing Returns

  Over summer (and the March lockdown) I read blogs from BenNewmark and Adam Boxer on how to create and use booklets of practice questions as opposed to power points. It has been a real game-changer for me in terms of the amount my pupils are now practising content, the mental capacity I have during a lesson to focus on how pupils and it massively reduces workload which gives teachers time to plan for their explanations and questioning. The blogs linked above explain the advantages of using them far better than me, but I wanted to speak about the process of creating and using them for me. It has been a process of trial and error for me this year and some of the key lessons learned are: 1.        It is incredible CPD for your subject knowledge I underestimated how much creating booklets enhanced my subject knowledge. I thought I understood by subject well but when you create these booklets, you specify exactly the knowledge you want pupils to know to write questions about them

  I have just completed the end of a never-ending first term as a head of department in a small department. Being in a new role in a new school would have been enough of a challenge without having to worry about what pupils have missed during lockdown, blended learning, year group bubbles and all the rest but here are a few things that I have learned: 1.        Relieve pressure rather than passing it on Running an Economics and Business department where there is only KS4 and KS5 there is always a big focus on exams. For all the focus on spreadsheets of data and looking at ALPS scores and the like, there is a real temptation to pass on that pressure by talking about where the data is against departmental targets. One thing that I have found so important is to make sure you take that on and just allow staff to focus on the important thing, planning and delivering excellent lessons. By all means, work with staff to identify areas of focus based on assessments, but as far as possible

 At the start of this half-term I shifted out department homework to using carousel learning . For the uninitiated it is a (for now at least) free platform to enable quizzes with a range of great features to make for effective retrieval homework, an evolution of Adam Boxer’s retrieval roulette. I say retrieval, of course there is no way of knowing that pupils are not looking at their notes or googling answers but the effort level of doing this means I suspect most are generally trying to retrieve. I started off my briefly explaining the benefits of retrieval which helped with this. Looking at their answers it does seem they are genuinely trying to remember answers from memory. It’s been a real game changer for me and there have been a number of benefits. Benefits 1.        Spaced practice. When you upload a question bank you can then select random questions from a range of different topics meaning that pupils are regularly retrieving information from topics that were previous