How I gained a healthier work-life balance by using my calendar

Teachers have to hold an enormous amount of information in their head at any one time. I struggle with remembering it all (classlists, names, lesson plans, key dates… the list goes on) and it’s only within the last few years I feel I’ve got to a point where I can separate my work life and home life in a manageable way. I hate using paper to organise myself, as I have never learnt how to keep it filed sensibly. I used to have vast to-do lists scribbled down which inevitably would get lost, or be indecipherable weeks later when I suddenly realised I was about to miss a deadline. I would worry that I had not written down the due date of an assessment, or realise that there was a Parents Evening coming up but had left the details of the dates in my office. It wasn’t healthy and it meant I found it difficult to switch off from school once I got home as I was unable to compartmentalise all those things I had to remember.

I started using the calendar on my email software after seeing a colleague do it, and it blew my mind – looking back, I’m amazed I managed to function without it. I used to use my planner for everything but as the years have gone by, I no longer order one as everything I do is through my calendar. These are the most common ways I use it to help me manage my workload and maintain a healthier work-life balance:

I put all my assessment deadlines in

This is something I do at the beginning of the school year (it’s easy and makes me feel super-productive). It was the first thing I used the calendar for and it means I never have a deadline catch me unawares. It’s pretty easy to do and doesn’t take long – I get a list of all the assessment deadlines (exams, data drops, etc.) and then go into the calendar on Outlook. I set it up so I can see each day in the week, then scroll through each week in turn and if there is an assessment deadline on a day in that week, I double click the 8:00am slot and add a title. I leave everything else blank but make sure I choose something under ‘Reminder’ – usually 2 weeks as that gives me plenty of time in case I need to do some assessment before entering the data. This means that 2 weeks before the deadline, when I open Outlook, a little reminder will pop up to tell me about it. This notification is easily snoozed until a time nearer the deadline when I am ready to deal with it.

I enter important dates/times as I receive them

Occasionally I get emails asking me to do something by a certain date such as contacting a parent, or if I can complete some feedback on a student. Often I can’t deal with this at the time of reading, so I click on the email and drag it down to my calendar icon. This automatically opens an Appointment window which can be quickly edited. I change the date to when it is due, alter the reminder (usually a few days before) and save it. This gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to remember it until it is crucial and nearer the time, which helps me focus on the immediate rather than feeling overwhelmed with a mountainous to-do list.

I add events that take place outside school hours

This is useful for a quick reference and I find it much easier than checking on a printout that I might mislay. It’s handy because I can always have it to hand, regardless of where I am. The process is simple: I do the same as above except put in events like staff meetings, open evenings/days, parents evenings and school holidays (!). I find it useful to put in specific times so I don’t have to check later for the start and finish of the event. I usually don’t bother adding reminders as I’m often aware of the dates coming up when I’m nearer to them.

I link my calendar to my phone

I find this really useful if I need to quickly recall the lessons I have the next day, or if I need to check whether I’m busy after school. I can also add events to my calendar if I suddenly remember I have to do something when I’m at home, and once it’s on my calendar I can forget about it until I’m back in school. I have two calendars on top of each other on my phone – my personal and my work one. Each can be turned on or off but I find this useful for things like parents evenings or other activities that take place outside the school day. This isn’t for everyone, as it does mean linking your school email account with your phone.

I use it to plan my lessons

This was the biggest change in the organisation of how I teach. It takes some time as I have to set up each lesson with an ‘Appointment’ and the start and end time. I turn off reminders, and put in the following:

Not all of this has to be filled in, obviously, but I find if I have it in one then I can just copy-and-paste across to others. A whole day’s schedule can be copied by holding down Ctrl on the keyboard and selecting each lesson individually. This can then be pasted to a new day. Unfortunately the “repeat weekly” or “repeat fortnightly” doesn’t work as I’d like it to, as half-term breaks and holidays break the cycle. I copy my entire timetable across manually for these which takes some time, but no more than writing the details for each class into a planner. 

 

I’ve found that the ability to chuck stuff into a delayed to-do list really helps me with my work-life balance as I can deal with things as needed, rather than see them mount up. I don’t worry about missing deadlines and, even though I often get 5-10 notifications pop up on Outlook each morning, it’s a relief to know my calendar has my back and stops me forgetting anything.

 

7 things that helped me settle in as a HOD at a new school

This time last year I was worried – partly because of the impending results day but mostly because I was nervous about starting at a new school as Head of Department. I’d been at my previous school for over 11 years, being a relatively big fish in a small pond, and wouldn’t be any longer. Of course I was thinking about new classes and teaching, but at the beginning – on those initial INSET days – I was more worried about settling in as a newbie. Below are a few things I did which seemed to work quite well to allay my nerves but also help the transition, from the perspective of getting to know my colleagues and feel confident in my role. Hopefully they’ll be useful to someone in a similar situation:

 

1. I prioritised learning names

This sounds obvious but I wasn’t prepared for how many names I would be bombarded with on the first day. I was used to knowing everyone in my old school, and everyone knowing me.

“I no longer be carrying round photo ID. Know why? People should know who I am”

Sue Sylvester, Glee

It’s difficult to remember 50+ new names when you can’t rely on the seating plan or a register. My school has a great resource on their VLE with pictures of all the staff on, so I used that to check names after being introduced to someone (and then tested myself later – got to love that Retrieval Practice!). A school’s DBMS – SIMS or iSAMS or whatever – will often do this too, but I wasn’t familiar with the software at that point. Sometimes I forgot a name, but tried to make sure I didn’t forget a second time.

 

2. I spent time with my department chatting to them

I had a small department so it was relatively easy for me to do this, but I think it was valuable. We chatted about anything from what they did in the summer, to what they were prioritising in the first couple of weeks for their lessons. It could have been easy to get wrapped up in my own concerns about my office/classroom/planner (budget… meetings… results analysis… the list goes on!) to forget that my own department had their own worries. I also gained some top tips from chatting – finding out everything from whole school events which might disrupt my lesson in the first week to when I should get onto the trips signup sheet to get the best ones. However, I was cautious not to take up too much of their time with talking when they had their own work to get on with.

 

3. I didn’t make any big changes early on

I left most of the curriculum the same as the previous year because I wanted to feel qualified in my judgment before changing anything. I planned to eventually make some changes, but recognised that it was important to fully understood the context before making any big alterations. I had priorities but wanted to ensure that before making a change, that there was a better reason than it just being something I used to do at my previous school or because I didn’t understand why it was done in that way. I avoided the phrase “at my previous school we…” completely. Nobody wants to hear about someone’s old school and it isn’t a good argument for anything.

 

4. I tried to find answers if my team had questions

I didn’t have all the answers and nobody expected me to. I endeavored to make sure that any questions from my department – for example, wanting to know the procedure for getting a student’s exam remarked – were followed through so I found out the answer for them, even if it meant pushing some of my own jobs down my to-do list. This isn’t just something I aimed to do in the first few weeks, but is generally decent leadership advice. Most people want a manager who has their backs and will do what they say they will do – I tried to prove to them early on that I would be that manager.

 

5. I spoke to people in person

Emails are great but in my opinion talking in person is much better, and phone calls a close second. I got to meet people and put a name to a face, I was more likely to get a quick response, and I usually received a more open response than can sometimes be limited by an email. Plus it got me moving around the school which was really useful for learning my way about!

 

6. I asked lots of questions

Unlike my previous school when I knew each policy inside out, I had to accept that I wouldn’t know the answer to everything. So I asked! Whenever I was worried that it might get irritating, I reminded myself that it would make my line manager’s life much easier if she could quickly answer my question than if I’d tried to guess the answer. I also asked people around me lots of questions, especially school policies that they knew the answer to and I didn’t because I was new.

 

7. I made a traybake

This was easily the most try-hard thing I did. I made a Lotus Biscoff White Chocolate traybake (they’re amazing, despite my lack of culinary skills: recipe here if you want it) and brought it to the department meeting, year team meeting, and just offered them to anyone who popped their head into the office. I openly admitted that I was using it to buy friends and curry favour, but people didn’t seem to care – it was food. Delicious food.

 

I was lucky – the support in place from my school was fantastic and I had a brilliant first year. If you’re moving schools this year, I wish you luck and hope that maybe something in here was useful (even if it’s just an amazing traybake recipe).

Time

I’m feeling tired today. Last night my youngest (she’ll be 2 in October) had a tough time trying to get to sleep, so my wife and I spent most of the early evening taking turns in soothing her. Each time we heard her cry there’d be a groan from us both, then one of us would go up. On the fourth or fifth time of rocking her and singing her a song to try and calm her, I had a stark appreciation of the situation. My eldest is 4 and she never needs us to go up to sing to her any more. I’ve got maybe a year left of cuddling and singing before that’s it – no more soothing the baby. While it’s difficult, it is something I will miss and I won’t get that time back.

Time’s one of those things we never seem to have enough of as a teacher and I know many of us struggle with this both professionally and personally. Each year when we receive our new timetables we scour them for the free periods as they dictate the time we have to catch up on work. Then the summer holidays arrive and we suddenly have a seemingly endless stretch of hours and days in front of us.

I did an assembly earlier this year on Time (I mean the topic was ‘Time’… I haven’t just written a blog post about how I was punctual). The premise was pretty simple, that we shouldn’t take life for granted, but that we should make the most of these moments – even if they seem difficult or arduous at the time (like me rocking my daughter who won’t go to sleep). I borrowed heavily from a fantastic blog at Wait But Why. At this time in the year for teachers – on the first days of the summer holidays – I think it’s important to think about what we do with our time to make the best possible use of it – even if it’s just to recharge before September.

I love an abstraction, and it seemed to work well for the assembly, so I put some graphics together which helped me think about time. They assume (probably optimistically) that I’ll live to the ripe old age of 90. I’m currently 36, so a simple one to start with would be my life in years:

(where the blue circles are years I’ve had, and the yellow are ones yet to come)

Boris became the new Prime Minister today. At the age of 36 I’ve seen 7 Prime Ministers, including BoJo. With a new one every 4 years or so, I can expect to probably only see another 15.

By today, all UK teachers should now have started their summer holidays. I have had 14 summer holidays as a teacher. The red dashed line marks the estimated end of my teaching career – assuming I retire at 65.

This all starts to look a bit morbid though. Some good news is that those extra holidays mean we get more time for leisure. The recent TeacherTapp on how many books are read was positive – on average, people in the UK read 4 books a year (YouGov, 2014) but it looks like most teachers are planning on reading 3+ books in just the summer holiday!

If I push myself into that group (4+3 = 7 a year?) then this looks better for my reading… a perk of being a teacher, definitely.

(378 for me as a teacher, and 216 for me as a non-teacher)

In my assembly I finished with the graphic below. It simply showed the number of months (Sept – July) that students had in school. I used Year 10 as they were in the middle (Years 7/8/9 on one side, Years 11/12/13 on the other) and it was a whole-school assembly. This image resulted in a quiet hum in the audience, and it’s the one that students mentioned later – the realisation that their education does have an end, and that their time in school does move quickly. Those older students already knew that they were at the tail-end, but this graphic apparently prompted some of them to question how much of that time had been spent productively. Sometimes a reminder that they won’t be sitting in classrooms forever is useful, especially for those who assume that it will all miraculously be OK once they reach their final exam year.

We as teachers go through the curriculum each year, tweaking and refining: they’re the ones who experience this though. As teachers, we need to make sure that time is spent as usefully as possible. That graphic could be easily broken down into weeks, days or lessons. In my department we certainly have some refining to do, giving more time to some topics and rethinking some that are less useful to the students. But that can wait until after I’ve finished my 3 books.

Reviewing our Key Stage 3 curriculum (1)

My school is reviewing its curriculum and my Deputy Head Academic has asked for volunteers for working parties to look at possible recommendations of changes that could be made. She asked that this be led by non-SLT, as she wanted to avoid any potential preconfirmed ideas or attitudes such as “we know we can’t do that because the timetable says so” or “we tried something like this a while ago and it didn’t work” (etc). When I was invited to lead the working party for the Key Stage 3 group, I was delighted as it’s an area I’ve followed on Twitter and interests me. Out of the working parties (KS3, KS4 and KS5), it is the one I think has the most potential as it is less constrained by external pressures like time and exam boards.

We were told to “think outside the box”, with some initial ideas to consider but given a relatively free reign on what we could recommend. It is envisaged that this whole process will take around two years, so I have written this post with the aim of it starting an ongoing series over the time we review the curriculum, outlining the journey and findings as I go along. This is more for me than anyone reading it but it will – I expect – outline the planning, challenges, mistakes and findings, which may be useful to others undertaking a similar task.

At this point (January 2020) we have our working party and have had one initial meeting. We decided to frame the research as a case study, using multiple sources for our research and recognising that our findings would be very distinct for our school at that point in time (i.e. cannot just be extrapolated elsewhere). The rough timeline we decided upon:

Spring 2020 – conduct secondary research (mostly websites) of other schools and their curricula, looking for anything unusual or pertinent. We will look at both primary schools (especially our feeders) and secondary schools in a similar position to us geographically, by intake and by situation (boarding school).

Summer 2020 – from the secondary research in the Spring Term, visit some of the schools and find out more about their curriculum and rationale behind it. Meet together before the end of the Summer Term to reflect on our findings as a group.

Autumn 2020/Spring 2021 – meet with Heads of Department (and others who may have a stake) using interviews and/or focus groups to ask for their input on possible ideas gleaned from our research, asking for their thoughts and own ideas, and how they may be included.

From then (Summer Term 2021 and Autumn Term 2021) we have not formed a plan as this will be made from our findings and we will probably revisit all strands of the research (external schools, interviews, etc).

Our current task is to research some other schools and what they did with their curricula. Alongside this I have shared a couple of David Didau’s curriculum related blogs with the group (https://learningspy.co.uk/curriculum/broad-balanced-curriculum/ and https://learningspy.co.uk/curriculum/breadth-trumps-depth/). I will also show them Tom Sherrington’s Curriculum Models. While we have been asked to look at more than just curriculum time, it is still a factor we may want to consider for various subjects – if even to just reflect upon how and why we offer something different.

I have set up a ‘team’ on Microsoft Teams to hold ideas and share resources. I can see how it could be useful, and some staff have shared links to websites and replied to thoughts, but I hope to also use the Notebook part for people to chuck screenshots, findings and anything else useful in so we have a collated place for all our research. In theory it should be a great tool, but it may be a little ambitious as not everyone is used to the software. We have another meeting before February half-term and I hope to be able to demonstrate how it can be used. If you read this blog and you’ve used Microsoft Teams before, I’d love any hints or tips as I feel like I’m being quite clunky and not using it to its full potential.

That’s where I am at the moment – starting secondary research of other schools (if you think you do something interesting please do reply to this or contact me on Twitter) with a view to visiting a selection of them later this year.

How I approach the IGCSE Computer Science pre-release (2019-20)

If you’re reading this then I assume you already teach IGCSE Computer Science so are familiar with the structure. This blog post will go through how I approach the pre-release with my students and how we prepare for the exam. It also contains links to some worksheets which I have put together to help my students write their programs (these are at the end of the blog post). It provides them with a similar problem – shown in the image for this blog post – and scaffolding which they can refer to when programming their own solutions to the pre-release.

 

Introduction

Before I give students access to the pre-release, I ensure that they are confident with the concepts of selection, iteration and arrays. Arrays are one of the areas I find students struggle with the most, and they’re an important part of the pre-release, so I believe they should have a firm understanding of them before looking at the exam board’s problem. If they do not understand how they work, then their planning will suffer as they won’t have the foundation knowledge to start thinking about solutions.

Before giving the students any handouts, I explain the task as a real life scenario. For this one, I will explain that there is a shop who want to sell their products using an electronic system. I will show them the list of products (from the pre-release) and talk through what the program should do. I will explain the three tasks and how each one builds upon the one before it.

I will then give out the pre-release document, as presented by the exam board, and read through it with the class. I will encourage them to highlight any important parts (such as validation) and consider the wording carefully. I find that the pre-release can be ambiguous sometimes but I think this is intentional as it allows students flexibility in approaching solutions in different ways.

 

Planning

I will not allow students anywhere near a computer until I am happy they have thought about their plan to approach the problem. Students could simply get straight onto Python and start writing code, but from experience I find this will often cause problems later on, especially if lessons are a few days apart and students forget what they were doing. I tell my students that they need to provide me with a flowchart or pseudocode (in Python if they wish, but written by hand) and be able to talk through how they will approach the program.

This is the point which shows the greatest difference in student programming ability. Some will manage to plan out their flowcharts easily, with a clear idea of how to structure their data and how the user will work their way through a series of options. Others will struggle to know where to begin. Because of this, I allow students to work on their own (or in pairs) but if they want help, I run through my own approach on the board, live, and talk through it. I often find that students will come to the board initially and listen, then will move back more confidently to their own plan after being given the first few steps to scaffold their approach.

Once students have shown me a plan, I will give verbal feedback and allow them to tweak it if necessary. I do not expect the plans to be perfect, but they should provide enough structure that someone could start to put together some code by looking at them alongside the pre-release data.

 

Programming

Students will be given the opportunity to start programming a solution (to Task 1 initially). There are a number of layers of help I give here:

1. Syntax sheets – these are simply sheets showing basic commands and how they are laid out (e.g. showing how a ‘for’ loop is written). Useful for when students know what they need to do but can’t remember the exact code. There are lots of examples of these on the TES.
2. Similar worksheets – these are worksheets for each task that I have put together from my own solutions to the pre-release. They don’t provide code for the pre-release itself, but for a similar task which will hopefully help the student consider how to proceed with their own code. Links for these are available at the bottom of this blog post.
3. Me – as a last resort I will look at the code, but I encourage students to look at the first two options first. If I provide the answer or tell them what to write, they are less likely to remember what they have done or why it works. This is a ‘desirable difficulty‘ which I want them to experience.

 

Validation & Testing

Once they have finished (or think they have finished!) their code, I get them to ask others to test it and try to ‘break’ it. This process reinforces the need for validation and reminds them about testing and different types of inputs they can use (valid, invalid, boundary etc).

 

Example Exam Questions

Finally, once the program is complete and students are happy with how it works, I give them some example exam questions to complete. I will put these together later this term and will add links to this blog with them. This encourages students to revisit their code and consider what they did and how it could be improved. It also gives them an opportunity to practice Paper 2 style questions which should help them in the exam.

 

LINKS

Click here to download the helpsheets for 0984 IGCSE Computer Science 2019-20 Paper 21 Pre-Release (FREE)

(there are some other resources on my TES page for IGCSE Computer Science which you may find useful, as well!)

How board games improved my teaching

There has been a resurgence in board games in the last decade. What used to be a dusty box brought out to play reluctantly with your family at Christmas has blossomed into a huge industry. Like the late-to-the-party hipster I am, I joined the trend a couple of years ago. It started as an excuse to meet up with friends every couple of months but soon turned into attending a weekly club and a pretty expensive hobby.

This post isn’t about getting into an excellent pastime (although if you are interested, my solid recommendations to start with are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne). It’s about how playing board games has helped me with my teaching.

An issue with board game enthusiasts is that there are a lot of games out there, all of which are potentially excellent. This means that at a board games club there will usually be a large number on offer and not everyone will have played all of them. There will usually be a number of players who need to be taught how to play. Mostly being on the student end for this has given me a lot of experience in how, and how not, to teach a game. It is a skill and can make or break the overall enjoyment for everyone taking part (which is important, as most of these games can take 1-2 hours). I like to think I’m reasonably good at delivering a rules explanation but thinking about how I teach a game has made me think more about how I teach my lessons as well.

Quintin Smith of Shut Up and Sit Down has a great video on how to teach a board game. It’s a good starting place for how to deliver knowledge as efficiently as possible while ensuring engagement… which is essentially what teaching a lesson is!

So here are my top tips on how to teach a board game (partially borrowed from Quins) and how they have improved my own teaching practice:

Make sure you know the game inside-out / Revise your subject knowledge

Quins describes this as “if you’re not reading the manual on the toilet for a week, you’re doing it wrong”. It is seemingly obvious but I’ve sat through rules explanations where someone literally opened the plastic-wrapped box, got the manual out and started reading it to us. After 30 minutes I’d given up listening and couldn’t care less. How does this translate to teaching? Know your subject knowledge inside-out, be prepared to field those tricky questions, and know what you’re going to be talking about! If it’s a challenging topic at an advanced level, then do your homework. Maybe not on the toilet.

Play a dummy game on your own / Check your resources

I wanted to play Arkham Horror LCG with my wife, and a friend recommended I play through the first scenario on my own first. It was the best advice I could have had – the little nuances for the game had me checking the manual every 5 minutes and that would have stilted the flow when we came to play it together. How have I taken this to my teaching? We bought in a number of resources this year and it can be easy to just rely on them instead of properly planning a lesson. I’ve been guilty of this and not only does it make the lessons flat, but there can be errors in external resources which break the lesson flow and are harmful to learning. If you’ve bought some resources then make sure it all makes sense and you understand them.

Start with How, Why and What / Provide context for the lesson

Most games will have a theme, from Azul’s laying tiles in a Portuguese palace to Tokaido’s quest to have a lovely enriching travel experience. Include this – it helps with the explanation of the game and it makes it fun to discuss as you play. And tell players how to win! This is often an afterthought because the teacher of the game is so worried about not missing out any details of how to play. Start with how to get victory points, then players can mentally refer to this as they are told how to take their turns. It’s the same in teaching – where does this topic fit in your curriculum? Why are you teaching this? How does it relate to previous lessons and how will it relate to future lessons? (Adam Boxer has some great blog posts on thoughts about sequencing a curriculum – I recommend starting here).

Know what to include and what to leave until next lesson / game

Don’t include all the funky addons or complicated rules for the first time you play. Leave out the farmers in Carcassonne, use the default map for Catan. Make sure that the players have mastered – and hopefully enjoyed – the game and then add in more intricate fancy rules as you return to it. With teaching, plan your lesson carefully – don’t overload students with concepts which can be returned to in a future lesson. If they can’t convert a binary number, they certainly can’t convert a floating point number. If this means returning to that lesson/game again, so be it. They need to master it before moving on.

 

And that’s where my analogies end. Quins talks about giving people bits of plastic to hold so they have “an emotional connection with the game” and I’m not entirely sure how I can shoehorn that into teaching.

Formative feedback is like a good murder…

The deadline for my MA assignment is in less than a month and I’ve made the executive decision to stop reading and start to get some words down. Blogs seem like a good way to procrastinate while feeling like I am doing something useful as I can hopefully borrow some of my thoughts from here and chuck them into the inquiry report. I’m relieved to stop reading but if I hadn’t delved through journals I wouldn’t have found the excitingly named ‘Focus on Formative Feedback’ (Shute 2008). At 47 pages I was hesitant about spending time poring over it, but it’s arguably the most useful piece of reading I’ve found on assessment. Anything that starts with a Russian proverb, and ends by claiming that formative feedback is like a good murder, is worth the printing costs. Shute looks at all those fiddly conflicting arguments surrounding feedback (“should I give long, detailed feedback? Some studies say it lowers the quality… some say it makes no difference… which is it?!”) and boils them down to some tidy Top Tips Tables on “What to Avoid” and “What to Do” (pages 30-33 if you’re in a hurry, by the way).

A big one which stood out for me when considering Whole Class Feedback (WCF) was the simple (yet obvious) idea that if the task given to students is too difficult/unattainable, they’ll lose interest; and if it’s too easy then any success they have with it is unlikely to result in and increase in learning. That’s so totally Vygotsky though and he’s way too mainstream so that’s a consideration for another day. With WCF it can be difficult to set the right tone, especially for a mixed ability class. In the few times I have used it this term with my Year 10 Computing class, their engagement dipped significantly after the first 20 minutes. I’d anticipated that the feedback they needed to respond to would take the better part of an hour so this was disappointing! The topic was dreary databases so there could be some reasons why they wanted to move on, but it did make me wonder if I’d pitched it at the wrong level as a number were struggling with their SQL to make it do what they needed it to do, when I had assumed they’d breeze through it after marking their work.

Some of Shute’s Top Tips that I have jotted down to consider and ensure I use when planning my WCF for next week are:

• Keep feedback simple but no simpler (like a tip that’s vague but not too vague, I guess… cheers!) – this will be trial and error and depend on the class. I’m conducting my inquiry with a single class so I am forming a better idea about what they can and cannot do, and what they expect/ want from my WCF.
• Remove uncertainty between performance and goals. This – from my interpretation – is as simple as making the success criteria clear and listed when I provide the feedback. Students like to know what they need to do to move forward so I need to provide as few obstacles as possible to help them access that.
• Focus feedback on the task, not the learner. This is similar to my last blog and I think I am going to avoid praising individual students for work, but will instead list (possibly show with pictures of work?) descriptions of the best pieces of work. The students it applies to will still know who they are.
• Avoid delivering feedback orally. This is an interesting one because I always assumed that verbal feedback could be just as strong as written. It’s interesting because she follows this tip up with “avoid only using text“. So a mix of both. I’m sure I can manage that. Like patting my head and rubbing my tummy at the same time.

I am feeling more confident about using WCF than I was at the beginning of the term. There are areas I need to improve upon to make it work for the students but that’s the whole point of inquiry research – ‘problematising’ and seeking to continually improve my own practice. Onwards and upwards!

Oh, and feedback is like a good murder because you need motive (the students need to want to do it), opportunity (the student receives the feedback within a reasonable timescale to respond) and means (the student is able and willing to use the feedback). Tenuous but that never stopped a metaphor before.

 

REFERENCES

Shute, V.J., 2008. Focus on formative feedback. Review of educational research, 78(1), pp.153-189.

My Issues with Whole Class Feedback

I love the idea of Whole Class Feedback. I love the enthusiastic blogs talking about how it’s eased the workloads of teachers who have tried it, and how it’s just as relevant and useful as writing out lots of individual comments. I really want to buy into it and go to my Deputy Head, waving evidence at him and proclaiming that our marking policy is not fit for purpose, and that personalised comments are a huge waste of everyone’s time. But I’m finding it difficult to believe that a single sheet of paper (or projected slide) for the whole class is going to provide better feedback than giving individual comments – verbal or written – to the students.

The question is not “does Whole Class Feedback” (ok, I’m going to just type WCF now – apologies for yet another educational acronym) work – of course having SOME feedback is going to be more beneficial to students than having none – but rather, is it better than the alternative of individualised comments to each student? It seems that while it may well solve a few problems, it brings up others that need to be addressed:

Student Motivaton

Black and Wiliam (1998) listed some key areas which must be met to claim that formative assessment (like WCF) is improved, one of which is the motivation and self-esteem of the students, following their feedback. They also emphasised that feedback should be about the “particular qualities” of the student’s work (which WCF fails to address) and should avoid comparisons with other pupils. Many of the WCF templates I have seen include praise for students who have done exceptionally well and whom the teacher believes deserve extra credit, and even named those students who did not do as well. Butler (1987) used the terms ‘task involvement’ and ‘ego involvement’ when describing motivation: task involvement where motivation is drawn from the individual mastering something; and ego involvement where motivation is drawn from the individual’s perceived self-worth against his or her peers. She found that in education, individual comments for feedback yielded higher task-involved perceptions and lower ego-involved ones. Given that we as teachers want to motivate students to complete tasks to a higher standard, it seems reasonable to argue we should avoid ego-involved motivation.

 

Lack of Dialogue 

For feedback to be truly effective, it needs to include a dialogue (Black & Wiliam, 1998); this does not necessarily need to be written. WCF restricts the ability for students to have a voice because they are all projected with the same message. How can they respond to feedback individually if they are all given the same message? This is something I struggle with – I suppose one alternative would be to speak to students while they work on an outcome in response to the WCF, but couldn’t this just be done from individual comments as well?

 

Lack of Detail

Lipnevich and Smith (2009) conducted some research into different types of feedback, part of which was whether students minded getting it from a computer. Worryingly, it seems students didn’t care whether their teacher or the T1000 wrote their comments… but that is a topic for another blog. With regards to WCF, they found that “students who did not receive detailed feedback obtained substantially lower final exam scores than those who received detailed feedback”. Which this seems obvious (you give kids more detailed feedback = they know more clearly what they have to do), this seems to be to be a strong argument against WCF which is just a set of simple statements given en-masse to students and is certainly not detailed.

 

I will give WCF a shot – I need to as part of my inquiry for my MA anyway, otherwise I wouldn’t have much to write about! – but the more I read, the more I question whether the only real benefit is that the teacher gains some time back which could be spent on other things like watching the new series of Black Mirror. This is the strongest argument in favour of WCF. If the teacher has 2 hours to do some work and spends all of that on marking, then there is an opportunity cost of any other work the teacher might do (planning, marking other classes, and so on). The Teaching & Learning Toolkit (Higgins et al., 2014) points out that individualised instructions aren’t very effective – which seems to point to WCF being better – but speculates that this is because the time spent on specific personal comments could be better spent elsewhere on providing other forms of feedback.

I can see how WCF would work, as it would allow for feedback to be given more frequently and there are certainly cases where the teacher may end up writing very similar comments repeatedly for most students. For any meaningful feedback to give targeted instruction on how to improve work, however, I’d argue that in the form I have seen and plan to trial there are still many areas where it falls short. I think in the first instance I will avoid named praise to reduce ‘ego-involvement’ motivation (but will list the qualities that the best pieces of work had instead). I will also do it alongside existing feedback; it is not going to replace individual comments.

 

 

REFERENCES

Black, P. and Wiliam, D., 1998. Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi delta kappan, 80(2), pp.139-148.

Butler, R., 1987. Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: Effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest, and performance. Journal of educational psychology, 79(4), p.474.

Higgins, S., Katsipataki, M., Kokotsaki, D., Coleman, R., Major, L.E., & Coe, R. (2013). The Sutton Trust-Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit. London: Education Endowment Foundation. [Available at http://www.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit ]

Lipnevich, A.A. and Smith, J.K., 2009. Effects of differential feedback on students’ examination performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(4), p.319.

 

Whoops

So a good 2.5 years later and I return to make a blog post after stating I would aim to do one every month. That’s 30  or so posts overdue. At the beginning I didn’t think I had anything worth saying and thought I needed to write in here so that people could read my thoughts (ha!). Then weeks passed and turned into months, and term got well underway so I was too busy, and then it became too long since my initial post so it was all just a bit embarrassing.

So on reading my last entry it seems that I’d set myself some targets:

Follow through on ideas I have

I feel that I’ve been better at this. I definitely had a scatter gun approach to ideas, and any new fad I’d read about would be shoehorned into a few lessons before I forgot about it. We had dreadful results in Computing in the summer of 2016 and it forced me to focus on a few small initiatives which thankfully paid off and resulted in much better results the following year.

Support my ideas with research

I’ve definitely done this. Since signing up to a Masters (more on this below) I have gained access to much more research literature, but even with just Google Scholar I have broadened my view. I read blogs with a critical eye and I question my own practice in a way I did not used to do. I don’t think I would have done this without Twitter and ResearchEd so I’m very pleased that these exist for the modern teacher!

“I’m going to do it properly”

I’m not really sure what I meant by this. I did have a grand idea of introducing research in a more formal way and working with other staff but it died a pitiful death when everyone was just too busy to humour another of my silly ideas. I feel I am “doing it properly” by formalising it with an academic qualification though…

 

… Towards the end of the 2015/16 academic year, I decided to look into getting a Masters in Education. I was deeply ashamed of the poor undergraduate degree I gained in 2004 and how, whenever I filled out an application form, I had to put it down. I’m not really looking for jobs actively at the moment but it’s still something that bothered me. I wanted to prove to myself – and others! – that I could ‘do’ academia and I also wanted to approach university as a mature student, in both senses of the word. I applied to Brighton for a part-time MA (over 3 years) and while it has been very challenging and time-consuming at times, I don’t regret it at all and feel it has improved my practice.

Back to the reason for updating this blog FINALLY, though. Our current assignment involves using ‘Professional Inquiry Research’ and we have to undertake an inquiry into an area of our own practice. The evidence is not supposed to be stringent and significantly quantifiable; it should not deviate much from what we would already do as a practitioner should we trial a new teaching method in class. So no student surveys, no data analysis – simply “does this work and how can I improve my practice” in a cyclical way: it may be that I end up with more questions than answers but that is the purpose. One way of logging what we do so we can refer to our findings is to keep a journal so I have decided – COMMITTED! – to keeping a blog updated for the duration of the inquiry. The area I’m looking at is Whole Class Feedback which had a buzz on Twitter last year but has died down somewhat, but I believe is less a fad than some teaching ideas on there (COUGH Growth Mindset COUGH).

I’ll hopefully update this blog in a couple of days, as I intend to do some WCF marking soon and take some pics of what I have done and how it went. This blog is not going to be a work of art and there will be swathes of typos and poorly formed sentences. To anyone reading this: sorry. I probably won’t even proofread most of my posts.

…See you again in 2.5 years!

ResearchED15: What I took home in my Party Bag of Thoughts

In Barcelona there are a number of five-year old children running round who have been dubbed ‘The Iniesta Generation‘. Nine months before they were all born, Barcelona were playing Chelsea in the UEFA Champions League Final and Andres Iniesta saved the day by scoring a last-minute goal. Celebrations from delighted Catalans across the country went beyond the usual jubilant hugging and as a result of this there was a 45% increase in the monthly birthrate for February 2010. Or so the theory goes.

I’d like to think that fantastic events like ResearchED do the same for teacher bloggers (yes, there was a point to the opening story) – speakers encouraging and inspiring nobodies like me to take fingers to keyboards and birth a new blog; furiously mashing out strings of words in the hope that it becomes something worth reading.

It was Becky Allen (@drbeckyallen) who encouraged me to take the plunge – her talk included 8 or so steps (I lost count after step 4, which doesn’t say much for my memory retainment) on how teachers could engage more with research. I’d managed to complete Step 1 already (Get a Twitter account) – hurrah!

https://twitter.com/mrrattle/status/640103285664448513

Step 2 asked me to blog… I fell short at this point. I left the conference vowing to have my blog up and running before the weekend was over. At 9pm on Sunday I still hadn’t done it and couldn’t find anything else to procrastinate over. Hi.

I’ve read a few other blogs that list the various talks people went to with their thoughts on each one; I don’t really want to write about that as I don’t think my thoughts are particularly interesting and I have my own notes so don’t need to regurgitate them for my own perusal later on. Actually, there was one talk that surprised me – I did not expect Tom Bennett (@tombennett71) to have a Scottish accent; for some reason I’d imagined him to sound more King’s Landing (and less North-Of-The-Wall). I was a little bit disappointed because I’ll now have to re-read all his TES blogs with a different internal voice.

While I’m not going to write about thoughts from each individual talk I attended, I firmed up a few ideas I’ve taken from the conference (only managed 3 but that’s quite a lot for me) and am going to log them here for my own reference:

I am going to follow through on ideas I think up in the school year
This is quite an important one for me. I often have phases where I try new concepts or ideas out on classes or in my own practice, but I rarely see them through in terms of reflecting on how successful they were or measuring the impact. I’m going to choose 2-3 at the beginning of term (so… tomorrow I suppose… bollocks) and revisit them every month or so to keep them fresh and try to see how successful they are (if at all).

I am going to try and support and consolidate my ridiculous iniatives with research
I often just think of ideas while walking home, or from a comment a student or teacher might make. I rarely go out of my way to find out if there is any research on them – not even a quick Google. I’m sure I could take time out of my Sim City app to bother doing this (even if my citizens lament the loss of their Mayor and riot…)

I’m going to do it properly
While I’m not going to pretend what I’m doing is proper research, I am going to do my best to document what I’ve done and measure the impact in some form.

I suppose I have a fourth; which is to update this blog at least monthly with what I’ve done/discovered. This is pretty much entirely for my own benefit – I know that if I don’t have something I feel obligated to do, then I’ll flake and not follow through on the little projects I’ve decided to commit myself to. By documenting and writing it up in this blog, I’ll feel that I need to continue with it and see them through. It makes sense to me, ok? Stop judging me.

I said stop it.

@mrrattle