My Diminishing Returns

 Since returning for Easter, one change I’ve been making is to insist that pupils answer questions in full sentences. I saw this on a Tweet from Lee Donaghy and Doug Lemov speaks about the ‘art of the sentence’ in Teach Like a Champion. In essence, the idea is that the more pupils practice speaking in a full sentence, the more able they will be to articulate their thoughts and improve their writing. It also highlights if pupils really understand what is being asked. A mumbled answer can mask a misunderstanding that whereas a full sentence often can’t as it requires a fuller explanation. One thing I have noticed is that even though the instruction is simply to answer in a full sentence, the outcome is that pupils expand the point they are making. In only a few weeks I’ve seen an improvement in both the amount pupils are writing as well as the quality of their essays. There are 4 points that I think are worth considering if you are trying to implement this in your own classroom...

  I’ve kept slightly detached from some of the discussions around curriculum that I’ve seen on blogs and CPD sessions in the last 18 months or so. This is partly because I’ve found it slightly too abstract and also that teaching Economics, I don’t have pupils for as long as most subjects so cannot devise a y 7-11 curriculum and have far less choice about what to teach. Having said that, I have recently read Kat Howard and Claire Hill’s book ‘Symbiosis’ and 'Gallimaufray to Coherence' by Mary Myatt which has inspired me to rethink how I consider the curriculum. In particular for KS4. My school start key stage 4 in year 9 so I have pupils for 3 years for their Economics GCSE. Previously I have worked sequentially through the specification but pupils ‘symbiosis’ has got me thinking about what the golden threads are that link the subject together and what the big ideas are that I want pupils to consider and how they can build on this through their 3 years of study. Before I d...

 I’ve recently been reading the ResearchEd guide to assessment as well as re-reading ‘Making Good Progress’ by Daisy Christodoulou as I prepared to write an assessment for my Y10 Economics GCSE class. I’ve been guilty in the past of relying on exam questions to get to what Daisy talks of as being the ‘final performance.’ In essence what pupils need to get to, is to be able to provide judgements about the importance of a variety of factors on an economy or firm. In order to do this they usually need some diagrammatical analysis and explain the impacts on different agents with a logical chain of reasoning. In a final exam, the way pupils do this is by reading an extract and then writing an essay explaining their judgement based on what they have read. The problem with setting this type of a question as an assessment and then analysing the results is that pupils could get it wrong for a wide variety of reasons. It might be they struggle to understand the case study, it could be th...

  Since becoming a NQT mentor, I have focussed on keeping observation feedback brief and actionable. Remembering how much there is to think about and how little bandwidth there is to consider how to improve, I have tried to strip back feedback and focus on a small number of areas that are practical. One reason for this is reflecting on my own NQT experience and some of the nebulous feedback I was given. I completed my NQT year in a school with an ‘interesting’ approach to teacher development and I have recently been looking back at some of the most useless observation feedback I’ve received. I mention this not as a judgement of the observer but as a reminder of how much feedback to trainee teachers really isn’t that useful. 1.        ‘Did all kids understand what you were teaching?’ I recall constantly being asked this as a new teacher. The short answer of course is no, not all kids will ever have fully understood everything I have taught. Shou...

  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 ...

  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 a...

 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 informat...

 A topic in Micro I have always struggled to teach is the price mechanism. It's a bit embarrassing to admit this given it is the foundation of all market economics but I often find that whilst pupils can understand the concept of an equilibrium and how an equilibrium can change, exactly why the price mechanism leads to an efficient allocation of resources can appear quite nebulous. This year, I have tried to break down what the component parts of this to sequence it more effectively and what I have got to is: 1. What is the economic problem 2. What is the impact of a change in prices on Demand/ what causes a shift in Demand 3. How do prices respond to excess demand or supply? 4. How does this lead to a new equilibrium? 5. What are the functions of the price mechanism that cause a new equilibrium? 6. How does this lead to an efficient allocation of resources? 7. How does this link back to the economic problem? The first 4 question are relatively easy to understand when explained exp...

 I read a blog about how a visualiser is used in RE by  Miss Cox and I’ve been reflecting on how I use my visualiser. A few of the main ways that I use it are: 1.        When explaining a new concept When I explain a new concept, I have all eyes on the board (using SLANT) and not taking notes as pupils listen to my explanation. I have been reading about the modality impact in cognitive load theory and the benefits of optimising intrinsic load with both visual and auditory working memory. What I try to do is slowly build a diagram under the visualiser whilst I am talking. So before half term I was going through the impact of a progressive tax and after I explained what the term is (more on definitions later) I will gradually start to explain how it will reduce inequality by first drawing a quick diagram showing the gap between rich and poor pre-tax and then a second diagram highlighting the difference after-tax. I try to avoid the split...

 This will be my first year mentoring a NQT and I have been thinking a lot about the best way to support them. I recently read Louis’excellent guide for NQT’s and it has got me thinking about the subject-specific guidance that heads of department can offer. I feel a strong responsibility to make sure I get it as right as possible. We have all seen what happens when NQT’s are not properly supported and this year more than ever when they have only had one placement, I suspect the level of departmental support will be crucial. I have always found the best development to be subject-specific and so I been developing a 3-step strategy to mentoring this year: 1.        Subject Knowledge Subject knowledge is always assumed to be excellent, but a university degree is a poor proxy for in depth knowledge for the specific content covered in a curriculum. Subject knowledge is sometimes seen as the poor sibling of pedagogical development but the two go hand i...

  I am moving to a new exam specification next year for A-Level economics which has more extended writing questions where pupils problem-solve rather than shorter factual questions (which there were more of in the EdExcel spec). Following on from an excellent chapter on novices not being mini-experts in ‘How Learning Happens’ I have just read David Didau’s ‘Making Kids Cleverer’ where he talks about this in depth. Aside from the points about the need for pupils to have a deep schema of knowledge that they can easily recall enabling them to effectively problem solve, I found the notion of different types of knowledge especially useful. Declarative Knowledge What I found particularly useful is the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge would be the ‘things’ I want pupils to know. If I wan pupils to be able to eventually solve problems about when governments should intervene in a market by imposing an indirect tax the declarative knowle...

When I first started learning about CLT, I started to consider how to chunk knowledge and break up instruction so pupils would practice after small pieces of instruction to reduce pressure on working memory. I tried to implement what I had read about specifying exactly what knowledge pupils needed to know. One problem initially was that pupils started to look at different topics as entirely separate and could not see the links between topics. Every topic in economics is linked. When looking at a factor like increased government spending, pupils need to understand how this impacts inflation, output, the balance of payments and how these all interrelate and impact different economic agents. It is impossible to understand one topic by itself. This was partly solved by explicitly teaching the links between topics and considering questions I ask pupils, so they must think hard about links between topics. But there was still something missing. Pupils could start to see links between topi...