My Diminishing Returns

  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...