My Diminishing Returns

The best piece of feedback I ever received from a lesson was in relation to one of the least commented of Rosenshine’s principles of instruction: ensuring a high success rate. I was giving some whole class feedback and pupils were giving some generic analysis of the impact of a subsidy on a market rather than making it specific to the industry in question. After going through some examples, I gave pupils an example answer and asked them to improve it by making it more relevant to a particular industry. As pupils were completing work, it was clear that they had slightly misunderstood what they were to do and believed that they needed to include quotations from an extract (which was one example I had used) rather than the more challenging work of making their analysis relevant to the extract. The fundamental problem was that I was using the activity and the feedback from it to determine if pupils understood how to improve rather than ensuring a high success rate before they started...

The formative book in my teacher training was Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov, containing a wide range of techniques to implement to maximise pupil learning. I have re-read parts of it this week to consider what techniques I either do not use or do not use consistently or not. As a trainee teacher, I tried to focus on 2 things at any one time to ensure my working memory was not overloaded in the classroom trying to do too much. In my NQT year I then tried to focus on 3 things and now I am going to look at 4 techniques that I want to practice until they become a habit in the first term back: Culture of Error I do have pupils volunteering answers in my class but there has been a slightly ‘over-competitiveness’ in some classes. I have tried to clamp down on pupils sniggering when a pupil gets an answer wrong or tries to whisper an answer to assist a peer who is struggling. I want to create a culture where mistakes are an opportunity to improve and pupils feel more confident abou...

Reading more about explicit instruction (and especially Adam Boxer’s excellent guide ) has had a significant impact on my use of concrete examples when explaining a concept.  I have blogged before on how I have tried to implement guidance on going from concrete to abstract but this takes this a step further: which concrete examples do you use.

“Pupils are responding to teacher feedback to improve their work with evidence of pupil progress.” I was the stereotypical new teacher spending evenings marking stacks of books and class time was then spent rewriting answers in a different coloured pen. These comments made it seem worthwhile though, pupils were improving thanks to my marking and DIRT. There was only one problem. Pupils were not getting any better.

I recently watched Jo Facer’s ResearchED talk about simplifying teaching, going through some of the mistakes she made in her early teaching career and it caused me to dig out the absolute car crash of discovery-based learning that was my first ever lesson and think about what went so wrong. Let me take you back to September 2018. I have a group of enthusiastic Year 12 pupils, ready for their first experience of A-Level economics and I am going to explain the concept of scarcity and the economicproblem. If you don’t know what these concepts mean or how they link together than I’m afraid you are in trouble as I’ve certainly no intention of explaining them to you in this lesson.

The blog that has had the biggest impact on my teaching this year has undoubtedly been by Pritesh Raichura on explaining a concept by going from concrete to abstract. In simple terms, starting an explanation with an example that pupils will be able to grasp easily and then when more abstract terms are used, pupils have the anchor of this concrete example to give meaning to the abstract term. Instinctively most of us would start explaining a theory or definition and then use an example to explain it rather than the other way round. I’ve become convinced of the merits of going from abstract to concrete, I think it’s especially helpful when teaching subjects like economics and business where there are so much jargon that it can seem like we are speaking a different language.