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Empowering Students to Take Responsibility

Emily is an inconsistent student. Sometimes she fully engages and works hard in lessons; other times, she switches off, forgets her homework, and completely disengages. Recently, while the class was practicing independently, she sat staring into space. Despite being reminded a couple of times by the teacher, she didn’t complete even the first question. She was held back at the end of the lesson for a conversation. During this conversation, she explained her behavior: “I can’t see the board. Maybe I need a printout of the lesson.” “I can’t read white paper; I need colored paper.” (There is nothing on her record about having eyesight issues or needing different paper.) The teacher could react in two ways: The Initial Response: “There is no reason why I should go out of my way to print different coloured sheets or a PowerPoint. Emily, you need to take responsibility for your learning and stop making excuses.” This is the initial intuitive response. If we want to encourage personal respons...
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All Hands Up

At the start of term, my colleague suggested that we implement "All Hands Up" in our sixth form lessons. Put simply, he proposed that we should expect every student's hand to go up for easy questions we might ask to check for listening during an explanation.  I was not on board. I immediately pushed back, suggesting it was authoritarian, false, and added nothing to the more popular “hands down” cold call. I was wrong. After observing it in action, I was sold. The energy in his classroom was something I had never seen before, and the participation ratio was through the roof. I set about implementing it in most of my classes. I also read Pritish Raichura’s incredible blog and his fantastic podcast with Craig Barton. The following are my thoughts on what "All Hands Up" has added to my classroom—and also its limitations. What It Can Do: Energy The first thing "All Hands Up" adds to your classroom is high energy. The lesson feels much more engaging if ever...
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Delivering Effective Explanations

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Delivering an effective explanation was something I struggled with when I started teaching. I would often waffle, be unclear, and watch as students glazed over, failing to follow the knowledge I was trying to convey, I would even ensure that if I was not explaining if I was being observed. However, after extensive research and observing other educators, I’ve identified two key principles to ensure explanations are effective: Principle One: Concrete to Abstract All explanations should start with a concrete example that illustrates the key aspects of the abstract concept you’re teaching. I also find it incredibly useful to explicitly explain what the concept is  not . This can be done by providing a non-example and explaining why it doesn’t fit, helping students better understand the boundaries of the concept. Principle Two: Checks for Listening Attention is essential for teachers, and unless we check that students are actively listening, our explanations may fall flat. I spend time ...
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Teaching Key Vocabulary - A Process

In the subjects I teach, Sociology and Psychology, students have to almost learn a new language.  There are abstract concepts, strange methodological terms and new words to describe old ideas. Making sure students can understand and use this vocabulary is crucial if they want to be effective social scientists.  With this in mind, I now take vocabulary seriously, and am more than happy to give a large portion of the lesson over to ensuring students understand key terminology - in this blog I’m going to try and present a process for doing this. 1. Check Prior Knowledge Sometimes, a word that you think that is new to the students may not be. They have learnt it in other subjects, or have some background knowledge of it. For example, as a psychology teacher I have to teach Adorno’s F Scale, which requires an understanding of the word fascism - students may have some understanding of this word from their history lessons.  To check this prior knowledge, I usually simply ask a f...
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Using Comparison for Feedback

Comparison is natural human instinct  I once, semi-jokingly berated my students for failing to come to conclusions and judgements in their essays. My frustration was, as I explained to them, to do with the undeniable fact that they are  always  making judgements – whether this be about the latest Netflix series, who they are friends with this week, or what lessons they like and don’t like. The point I was getting at, which is the main focus of this blog, is the fact that humans have an inbuild propensity for making judgements, and perhaps more importantly, making comparisons.  There is a reason why wine tasting events are so popular. You give people two glasses of wine, and they can compare and tell you which one they prefer, without too much cognition.  The question is, how can this natural comparative instinct be put to use in the classroom? Students need to understand what they are comparing “Answer B is the better paragraph” “Why do you think that?” “It’s lo...
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On Meaningful Learning

When I look back at my professional life, I am in no doubt that my development as a teacher is a slow ongoing process, with no real watershed moments, just a constant stream of new experiences and ideas that continuously help me improve as a teacher.   However, there is one idea that changed everything for me, an idea I scarcely came across during my training and ECT years - Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory, or to be more precise Sarah Cottingham’s ‘In Action’ interpretation of it. The short book reframed my thinking about teaching, and whilst I could write a very long blog about this, I want to narrow it down to the one key idea that changed the way I planned, taught and reflected as a teacher.    We cannot learn anything without it connecting to something we already know   This point terrifies me in a way. When I look back to my early teaching, I 100% saw each lesson as an isolated event, completely different to the previous lesson and the subsequent one. Cotti...
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Memory is the Residue of Thought – but how do we get students to think?

Arguably the most important claim in the whole of the cognitive science discourse is the claim that memory is the residue of thought. Put simply, students will remember what they thought about during a lesson. Willingham gives the hilarious yet instructive example of a teacher, who was teaching the Underground Railroad, who got his students to bake biscuits as this was a staple food for enslaved people.  Clearly this would not get students to think about the necessary material, and they would instead remember the process of preparing and cooking the food, rather than the historical knowledge that they needed to know. This principle led me to think about planning in a completely different way. I now take a ‘thinking view’ of my lesson, and try focus on this viewpoint throughout the lesson. My focus, whether I am questioning, explaining, or making sure students are demonstrating good behaviors for learning, is on what the students are thinking about.  The implications of having ...
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