Never Eat Shredded Wheat: how I blinded myself to my class’ knowledge deficit

As teachers, we often have to remind ourselves of the importance of knowing children’s starting points in any given subject. But what happens when their general knowledge is so lacking, that we cannot even begin to conceptualize what schema they are missing?

I recently ran a CPD session for teachers at my school, emphasising the importance of explicitly teaching children knowledge. As a follow up, the Deputy Head sent round a blog post by Tom Sherrington in which he discusses the case of a 17 year old who did not know what ‘Vietnam’ was and therefore couldn’t adequately answer a comprehension question about Mohammed Ali. This blog post perfectly encapsulated everything I had been trying to communicate, and I incredulously mulled it over – how could a school have allowed a pupil to reach the grand old age of 17 without knowing what Vietnam was? I knew that we, as a school, could do more to equip our children with a good level of general knowledge, but at least, I reassured myself, we weren’t letting children leave primary school without the absolute basics.

How very wrong I was.

Last week, I team taught a year 6 guided reading lesson on the Renaissance. We have moved towards whole class guided reading, with an emphasis on systematically building knowledge. This was the first lesson and very much focused on contextualising the unit. I therefore started with a world map, recapping the continents and oceans. As I had already taught this lesson to my own class, I knew the level of geographical knowledge was very low, so I tried to address that. I revised geographical vocabulary like North, East, South and West. I was alarmed that the vocabulary seemed new to them. Had they never heard the mnemonic ‘Never Eat Shredded Wheat’ that was drummed into me as a child? How had they got to age 11 without such basic understanding? I also taught them that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, something they really, really should have learnt in KS1.

This is not to say that all children in the class lacked this knowledge, but from my understanding of the cohort and from the small proportion who demonstrated having this knowledge, I assume that those children had acquired it through means other than school, for example families, private tutoring or independent reading.

So far, so shocking. Towards the end of the lesson, I had to leave, so my colleague took over. I left the children with the task of studying a simple map of Renaissance Italy and answering question such as, ‘What cities are located on the coast?’ and, ‘What island is located at Italy’s southern tip?’.

The children had drunk in the knowledge I was sharing, and seemed to be on task, so I left, feeling confident that the class could complete the work.

In fact, when I later caught up with my colleague, she informed me that she’d had to explain how to recognise a city on a map, and how to work out when cities were on the coast. Indeed, it appeared that many children did not know what the coast was. So although I’d already assumed a very low base level of knowledge, I had not pitched the content low enough. Indeed, the National Curriculum includes the ‘coast’ in the list of physical features children should be familiar with by the end of KS1. And here they were, at the tail end of KS2, complete blank slates.

This is probably even worse than a 17 year old not knowing what Vietnam is, especially since the UK is an island, and therefore the coast is quite an important geographical feature of the land! How can we have allowed our children to get to year 6 knowing so little about geography? I wish I could say that their knowledge of the other humanities is deeper, but I can’t.

Two things struck me: if this year 6 class had not known what ‘coast’ meant, my own class probably hadn’t either. But while this class had the benefit of a teacher who noticed the gap and addressed it, my class had a teacher who assumed this knowledge and so didn’t explicitly teach or re-teach it. Because the children had been able to complete the task, I assumed they all had the vocabulary. What is probably closer to the reality, however, is that some had it, others guessed from context and still others copied or quietly got away with it. So in my so-called knowledge rich lesson, I missed a key bit of knowledge – because I hadn’t realised how much was missing. Or perhaps more accurately, I hadn’t wanted to realise.

I hadn’t wanted to imagine a world in which we, as teachers, were exacerbating our pupils’ disadvantage. The children I teach are disadvantaged in many ways, and by denying them the chance to learn directional language and recognise basic geographical features, we are further robbing them of the opportunity to be successful. Something had clearly gone wrong in their education to date.

So, what’s the solution?

A) Honesty: as individual teachers, as a school and as a profession, we need to be honest about what children know, don’t know and need to know. What can they learn at home, what can they learn naturally, what can they learn through exposure, and what must be taught explicitly? The curriculum working party at my school recently asked teachers to honestly evaluate what proportion of the non-negotiables we were covering. Teachers insisted that they were covering all or most of them. Perhaps a more incisive question would have been: what proportion of the non-negotiables are the children learning and how do you know?

B) Curriculum: in order to ensure that year 6s leave school knowing what the coast is, and that 17 year olds can name countries around the globe, we must develop cohesive, coherent and systematic knowledge-rich curricula. We must move away from teaching random units and expecting children to make connections between them. This is not how we educate children to be well-rounded. In order to achieve that laudable aim, we must insist on as coherent a curriculum as possible.

C) High expectations and rigour: all our children should master the curriculum. Good, well-structured teaching allows the primary school curriculum to be accessible to all. It is by denying children the chance to access it, through attainment seating, setting, or poor teaching, that we deny them the chance to master the material. According to the EEF, ability grouping has a very small positive impact on high attaining children, and a small negative impact on low and middle attaining chilldren. If we choose to group children according to ability, how can we be surprised when our lower attainers do not know their times tables? If we reflect honestly, have we ever expected them to learn them? Or have we, at the earliest sign of difficulty, labelled them ‘low ability’ and given them a times tables square?

In her own CPD session, my Deputy Head used a fantastic analogy for the consequences of having low expectations: when drivers fail their driving test first time, the driving school doesn’t give them a modified curriculum which bypasses core skills such as changing gears and reversing, and then allow them out onto the roads. Learner drivers are expected to take more lessons, work harder and practise – any other approach would have tragic consequences both for the driver and the public at large. And yet, too often, when we discover a child hasn’t understood, we lower our expectations of them. “It’s okay,” we say, “have this easier worsheet”. The problem is, they then go out into the very same world as their high attaining peers: our low expectations harm them in the long run. It most certainly is not okay for them to not understand the content of the lesson – and it is up to us to find a way of ensuring all children master the curriculum.

As I discovered this week, it’s uncomfortable to confront the reality of how little our children know and to admit that we as teachers can sometimes play a guilty role within that. But it’s only by being brutally honest, developing a curriculum which fills those gaps, and expecting all children to master it, that we can be sure we are doing everything in our power to give our children the best chance of success.

‘Make it Stick’ part 2: interleaving

As you may remember, I have started to send round research emails at school, setting out the main ideas from research and books I’ve been reading. I’ve started by discussing Make it Stick*, beginning with retrieval practice in this post.

This week: interleaving.
Before I launch into an explanation of this idea, I will recap some of the core principles without which the explanation may not make sense. In recent years, the accepted definition of learning has become the transfer of knowledge and skills to long term memory – i.e. successful learning happens bit by bit and stays with you forever. (This is why it is so hard to accurately measure progress in the time scales we have – especially over the course of a single lesson – and therefore why we are still not really sure makes great teaching!). The research discussed in Make it Stick*, therefore, concerns learning in the long term sense – not whether children remembered a definition at the end of a lesson, but whether they remembered and were using it accurately a year later, for example.

Retrieval practice may have seemed more or less intuitive or like common sense: practice makes permanent, after all. Interleaving seems less so to me. It’s the idea that it is more beneficial for children to practise multiple processes/skills simultaneously, rather than engaging in massed practice of one process or skill.

What does this actually mean?
The clearest examples come in maths or grammar. Often, units in maths don’t simply cover one operation (e.g..addition) but two (addition and subtraction). Research shows that children will learn more efficiently (learn more) and effectively (permanently) if these are are practised together. So rather than giving children 20 addition questions, we would do better to give them 15 addition questions, with 5 subtraction questions interspersed. This can also be achieved with percentages, fractions and decimals, multiplication and division, geometry and translation. Other topics that can be interleaved into all of these are measure, money and place value.

This form of interleaving can be termed inter-question interleaving (my own term). We can also have intra-question (my own term) interleaving, what we might also call multi-step word problems, in which children have to use more than one operation or convert between units of measure within the same question.

What’s the case for interleaving?

Exposing children to one skill at a time (e.g. addition) until they’ve mastered it, before moving on to another skill (e.g. subtraction), intuitively feels like the right thing to do. Children seem to make rapid progress and grow in confidence. They do brilliantly on their hot tasks; it seems like they’ve learnt it. But, just as with re-reading as opposed to retrieving, we are confusing mastery with fluency: research shows that if those same children were tested on addition a month later, their progress would look much less impressive.

At this point, it’s important to remember the definition of learning and its emphasis on long-term memory. The research shows that through an interleaving method, short term gains may seem smaller and more difficult to attain: children will struggle and their hot task results may leave something to be desired.

But that, it seems, is sort of the point. This all comes back to the idea of effortful learning: learning is not supposed to be easy. Indeed, Lev Vygotsky posited that learning had to take place in the zone of proximal development – where children were neither unchallenged nor too challenged.

When faced with a stream of sums, which all follow the same pattern or process, we begin to switch off and just go through the motions: our working memory is not consumed with thinking about the problem – that’s fine, once we’ve reached mastery. In primary school, children are still novices and therefore their working memories should be 100% consumed with what we want them to learn – learning must be effortful. Indeed, as Daniel Willingham has written, ‘Memory is the residue of thought,’ and thinking is effortful.

This doesn’t mean that in the initial instruction phase (i.e. lesson 1 of addition in every year) we should immediately bombard children with subtraction questions. At this stage of instruction, children’s working memories are working overtime and are very delicate. Any confusions or extra unnecessary difficulties (extraneous load) may lead to misconceptions, a high level of frustration, and ultimately, low levels of self-efficacy. Of course, the addition questions themselves should be challenging (intrinsic or germane load) so that children are thinking about them, but it is probably best to save interleaving until the end of the lesson (when children are more secure) or until the next lesson. A good way of interleaving at this more secure stage is simply using the reverse operation.

What does this look like in the classroom?

I have been trying to interleave wherever possible:

– Grammar: every morning, children complete grammar work during the register. I have designed a two-week cycle which starts with new content, providing practice time and then interleaving of older learning.

– maths: in addition to inter and intra question interleaving, I start every maths lesson with 7 questions on the board, covering the majority of the topics mentioned above. This means that children are regularly practising/retrieving old learning. It also means I can identify areas of weakness and target this through intra or inter question interleaving later on in the lesson. Finally, it means that when children are faced with subtraction in a multiplication unit, for example, it doesn’t throw them completely off course, thus overloading their working memories.

I haven’t got any specific English tips this time, as English is a continual interleaving exercise, with children practising a variety of skills and applying a large body of knowledge (e.g. handwriting, composition, grammar, features of the genre, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary). If anyone does have any English specific ideas, please let me know!

Next time, I’ll be covering elaboration.

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‘Make it Stick’ – part 1

I’ve just finished a really interesting book (Make it Stick*). It sets out to identify strategies which promote long term learning. In recent years, the accepted definition of learning has become the transfer of knowledge and skills to long term memory – i.e. successful learning happens bit by bit and stays with you forever. (This is why it is so hard to accurately measure progress in the time scales we have – especially over the course of a single lesson – and therefore why we are still not really sure makes great teaching!).

So, how can we make it stick? Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be distilling the main ideas from the book, one idea a week. This week: retrieval practice.

The authors argue that retrieving ( = remembering) learnt information, rather than being re-exposed to (re-taught) it, is more likely to lead to long-term learning. This means that, if we want our pupils to really learn something for the long-term, it is better to ask them to retrieve this (for example, through questioning with corrections if necessary) than to simply re-tell or re-show them.

Research cited in the book includes children reading a text and being tested on its contents. One group revised through self-quizzing (retrieving), while the other group merely reread the text. The two groups then took the same test, with the first group outperforming their peers. (This has been replicated many times but ironically I cannot remember the other studies and I refuse to re-read….maybe I’ll retrieve this from my brain some day!).

This is called the testing effect. Even after seeing the scores, both groups still said they thought that re-reading, as opposed to retrieving, was the best way of revising. This is because we all suffer from a number of cognitive biases, and one of these is that we mistake fluency for mastery. When we reread something, it seems familiar and we are comforted by this. Retrieval, on the other hand, can be really difficult, and we feel we’re not gaining anything from it. Here’s the rub though: the more difficult the process of retrieval is, the deeper the learning.

An analogy I find really helpful is the idea of the brain as a forest, with each tree being a memory. Every time we retrieve a memory, we are building a path through the forest to that tree. Every time we retrieve the memory, the path becomes clearer; there are fewer branches and leaves in the way. The first few retrievals, just like the first construction of a path, are the most powerful. We could extend this even further: once the knowledge has been firmly planted in our long-term memory, we put paving stones on our path, we paint signposts on the trees, we put a fence around the path…it becomes un-erasable or indestructible: it has been firmly lodged into a long-term memory. The pathways to that memory are strong.

An example from the classroom:

In year 6, we have been learning about WW1, which was concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. After a lesson on the Treaty, in which children have been explicitly taught the knowledge I want them to learn (i.e. have in their long-term memory), the next lesson should begin with a quick low-stakes quiz (no marking, no scoring etc.) on that knowledge, rather than with a recap led by me. As Daniel Willingham has explained in his book Why don’t students like school?: ‘Memory is the residue of thought’. By asking children to retrieve what they learnt about the Treaty of Versailles, rather than being re-exposed to it, we are giving them the opportunity to think about it and therefore learn it.

Takeaways:

This might all seem obvious, but I know that I’ve missed lots of opportunities to capitalise on this idea.

For example, it might lead us to reconsider providing children with word banks when writing: are these words we want them to learn? If so, would they benefit more from retrieving the word rather than copying it? Do we therefore need to explicitly teach it to the whole class first, thus levelling the playing field and raising expectations?

Alternatively, could we give the children some clues, such as the definition of an appropriate word, rather than the word itself? Or perhaps the other way around: provide a word bank but require children to explain the meaning of any word they use.

There are many ways in which we can incorporate retrieval practice into the classroom, be that through self-quizzing, low-stakes spelling and times tables tests, memorising poems, low-stake quizzes etc. What’s really important to remember is to keep coming back to previously learnt material, even if it was a long time ago. If we want the children to remember what they’ve learnt, we need to give them plenty of opportunities to think about it.

Here are some practical, English-related ideas that I have been or will be trying out over the next few weeks.

1) Using a definition word bank instead of just the words (see above for explanation).

2) Swapping from recap of previous lessons to quick low-stakes quizzes e.g. What is a fronted adverbial? What does the word ‘vindicate’ mean? Is the word ‘alienated’ a verb, adjective, noun or adverb? Use the word ‘ecstatic’ in a sentence. What relative pronouns do we know? What was the main event in the last chapter? How did the character feel when….?

3) Starting each day with a low-stakes spelling test. I do these every day in varying formats with same 10 words for 4 days (I call them ‘unofficial spelling tests’) and on Fridays we have our ‘official’ spelling test in which I bring back spellings from previous weeks (20 spellings).

That’s it for this time. Next time: interleaving!

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For the love of research

As a new middle leader, I’m still finding my feet and determining the precise scope of my role. Although I’m in principle KS2 English Lead, I find it difficult to think of good teaching solely in terms of the teaching of English. I am so interested in education in general, that I cannot separate good quality English teaching from good quality teaching of maths, science, history, art etc. This is why I’ve started to send around research emails, which digest important books or research papers and suggest tips for improving English teaching and learning (just in case someone accuses me of not being English-focused enough….). I’m not sure exactly what these emails will achieve, but I hope that they will pique my colleagues’ interests and provoke debates, discussions and questions about education and our roles within it.

These emails also serve another purpose: they allow me the space and time to process what I’ve read and find ways of articulating this to others. I find I swallow books whole, swiftly moving onto the next one, without taking the time to digest them. Funnily enough, I’ve just read Make it Stick*, and this process of retrieval and elaboration is exactly what the authors recommend to, well, make it stick. So in essence, I’m sending round emails, couched as professional development for my colleagues, while secretly being a tool to reinforce my own learning…it’s a win-win!

I thought I’d go a step further and document my attempts at spreading the research love – perhaps someone out there wishes their English lead sent around emails? Well, fear not, Christmas has come early for you! Here is a version of the first email I sent around: an introduction to the idea of using research to inform practice, in which I refer to Tom Sherrington and Barak Rosenshine.

Blog posts provide an accessible route into education research and since the landscape is so marred with debates such as progressivism vs traditionalism and skills vs knowledge, I thought I’d start off with a balanced voice: Tom Sherrington’s blog post, Evidence-Informed Ideas Every Teacher Should Know About.

In the post, Tom Sherrington distills some simple yet effective strategies to keep in mind when planning, delivering and reflecting on lessons. I really enjoy his blog – if you’d like to read more from him I can recommend his book, The Learning Rainforest*, where he goes into more detail about cognitive science, memory and the knowledge vs skills debate.

For those whose curiosity was piqued by Teacherhead, I attached Barak Rosenshine’s article Principles of Instruction, which sets out the evidence around what works best in education. This has come to be seen as a classic. Ideas include:

• recapping learning at the start of every lesson

• breaking knowledge down and allowing time for practice

• providing scaffolds

• building independence

These may all sound really obvious and we probably all do these to varying degrees every day. However, the article goes into some depth and allowed me to critically reflect on what I was actually doing vs what I thought I was doing. We do a lot of things and make a lot of decisions every day, and it’s so reassuring to be able to justify to yourself (and others), based on evidence, why you’ve made that choice.

It also really helps, especially for those of us with less teaching experience, to use teachers’ collective wisdom (i.e. evidence and experience) to improve our practice.

So that was email one. I hope someone out there found it useful. Please do comment with any suggestions on other important articles/blogs/books I should share with my colleagues. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be distilling ideas from Make it Stick*.

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Talking to my family about teaching

The great thing about teaching is that everyone has an opinion on it; the worst thing about teaching is that everyone has an opinion on it.

Before I’d even started teaching, my extended family regaled me with stories of their best and worst teachers and doled out advice about behaviour management strategies, dealing with angry parents and reading aloud to children, as if they were veteran teachers who’d stepped out of the classroom or the conference they were leading purely for my benefit.

Twitter has been set alight this week by an article in the Guardian which likened silent corridors to the gulag. As a teacher who works in a ‘challenging’ school, I couldn’t put my thoughts better than did this teacher. As a teacher whose classroom is at the intersection of two noisy corridors, a silent corridors policy is music to my ears: it means no one in my class is distracted, it means I don’t have to split myself in two in order to manage behaviour both within and outside my classroom – it means respect for teaching and learning, which, afterall, is the purpose of school.

I am currently on holiday with my family and I thought I’d share this ludicrous article with them. None of them are teachers; none of them have stepped foot in a school since they graduated themselves. And yet, they have such strong opinions. At the mere mention of ‘silent corridors’, a look of horror plastered itself across their faces. Silence? What about expression? What about fun? What about freedom? (This from someone who deplores the ‘freedom’ narrative in all other contexts).

What I’ve realised over the last three years, is that these liberal views, epitomised through progressive education, are still the norm. In an ideal world, children could learn on their own terms, through exploration, talk and discovery. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just trust children to walk down corridors respectfully and quietly without ever having to teach them what this looks like? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could put 30 teenagers in a room and simply facilitate their learning? The reality is different and these views betray an ignorance around inequality of educational outcomes and cognitive psychology:

1. Inequality of educational outcomes

In the UK, children’s success educationally and generally is determined by their socio-economic background. This is a travesty and explains the need for high expectations in schools. The role of education is to break the privilege-success cycle and that’s only possible if we are 100% consciously commmitted to the goal. That’s why I can’t take seriously the complaints of silent corridor policies or lack of ‘fun’ at school – the purpose of school is not for children to have unfettered freedom, but to equip them with the knowledge and skills which will allow them to realise their dreams. Being able to talk in a corridor is not conducive to that, but fostering self-discipline and a respect for institutions and learning may be. As a side note, private schools operate these expectations – are they like gulags?

2. Cognitive psychology

Education is a vast beast and the author of the Guardian article claims to be able to prove causation (when she claims to know what has caused improvement in exam results at Ninestiles school). However, education experts such as Dylan William and John Hattie struggle to do so, so it is unlikely in the extreme that a columnist with no expertise in education can. Nevertheless, in this landscape of uncertainty, direct instruction (meaning traditional teaching) recently made headlines: 50 years of educational research has shown that progressive, student-led learning does not lead to improved outcomes to the same extent as traditional teaching does. Even former die-hard progressives are turning away from their so-called liberal ideals.

This finding can be explained by research into memory and cognitive load. This is not the place to expand on this but if you’re interested, I recommend reading Daisy Christodolou, Daniel Willingham and listening to Craig Barton’s fascinating podcast: Mr Barton Maths.

In a nutshell, if the children we teach are going to succeed, they are going to have to work that bit harder than their middle class counterparts. Every minute that they spend focused on something other than learning is an obstacle to that goal. More than that, the time it takes to recover from that distraction impacts not only those students, but also on their classmates and teachers. Every interaction in school has a cooling time. Gossiping between lessons stops children absorbing what they’ve learned; it creates noise (thus requiring teachers to intervene); it requires those students in question to, upon entering their new classroom, forget the conversation and engage their learning brains. Is the cognitive lag caused by such trivial conversations worth it?

As research has shown, we are not capable of multitasking; we are merely task switching.The amount of cognitive effort it takes to switch from learning to gossip and back to learning is huge, and it may not even happen at all. What if your friend reveals something earth shattering just before maths? Will you be able to focus on algebra the second you sit down? Don’t we want learning to always be the easiest choice for our children? These so called ‘cruel and mean-spirited’ policies allow children to make the right choice, all the time. Is it more cruel to insist on silence in 5 minute transitions or to focus not on learning, but on fun or freedom, to the long term detriment of our children, perpetuating the deprivation cycle that exists?

Our pupils and teachers literally do not have the time to waste on gossip and picking up its pieces. It may be fun and necessary, but children have plenty of time to gossip – at lunch, break, on the way to and from school and at home. While children are at school in learning mode, is it too much to ask that we prioritise learning?

Still, these views are attractive and I once shared them. In my teacher training, our tutor told us of a class who walked everywhere in silence. I was critical: were those children happy? Were they fulfilled? Did they feel loved?

Now, I don’t know about that individual teacher or that individual class. But after three years of teaching and this year inheriting a year group where chaos ruled, I believe enforcing those kind of rules allows children to feel loved. It’s like with permissive parenting – parents think they’re being kind but children just feel abandoned. Children in classes where the teacher is not in control aren’t better off.

But it’s hard to come to that conclusion if you’ve haven’t been a teacher, charged with the well-being of thirty children.

The best thing about teaching is that everyone has an opinion on it. The worst thing about teaching is that everyone thinks their opinion is just as valid as yours- the professional’s. We all went to school, right? Well, we’ve all lived in buildings but I think we would all agree that this doesn’t give us the knowledge and experience of a builder.

Teaching is wonderful and talking about it is too – but it would be even more wonderful if teachers were more trusted and their opinions valued.

What can we learn from book looks?

As a relatively new teacher, lots of aspects of the profession are still novel to me. Part of the aim of this blog was to give me space to reflect on the experiences I face as a teacher. Recently, my school undertook a whole-school book look, and I was surprised by how much I learned from it. For more experienced teachers, the novelty of book looks may have worn off, but it seems to me that these scrutinies deserve more credit than they are given. The purpose of this post is to reflect on what happened in my school’s recent book scrutiny, and consider how these lessons could inform future book looks.

What I learned 1: The value of a holistic approach

I completely understand the value of looking at books, but I also wonder how much we can actually tell about a classroom through a single source. The issue which cropped up for me, was that although the assistant head was giving me my feedback, he hadn’t actually seen my books. So there was a disconnect between what the feedback said and the assistant head’s ability to explain it or go into further detail. Moreover, neither the assistant head, nor the middle leader who had seen my books, has seen me teach. As I will explore below, I found this problematic.

One of the comments I received was that some spelling errors made by children were not corrected by the teacher. This is an understandable concern, as teacher pen is often the quickest and easiest way of identifying focus, especially in areas like SPAG. However, in light of my school’s feedback policy, which emphasises the impact rather than the evidence of feedback, perhaps it’s time we moved away from what can seem like a box ticking exercise. “Does she focus on spelling? Well, she’s underlined all the spelling errors, so she focuses on spelling.” Such an approach doesn’t adequately take into account the impact of the feedback provided to the pupils.

It is now widely acknowledged, including within my school, that the best kind of feedback requires more work from the pupils than it does from teachers. For example, when marking maths work, teachers can tell children how many errors they’ve made, and ask them to identify them. Not only do the children have to re-check their work in a critical way, they then also have to correct it. This is in contrast to a teacher identifying the incorrect answers for the children: half the work has been done for them. The former approach might not feature any underlining or signalling to the children – does that mean the teacher hasn’t effectively used feedback in order to foster progress?

How can this be transferred to spelling? Rather than focusing on whether children have been signposted towards their errors, we could look at the impact of the teacher’s feedback, simply by comparing work from September to the present day, with a focus on spelling. If there has been, across the class, an improvement in spelling, can we not safely assume that there has been a focus on it? If evidence of this is absolutely necessary, book looks must take a more holistic approach. This could include looking in spelling books, ascertaining the frequency with which children are tested, asking children how they’ve improved their spelling, and most importantly, having a good understanding of the routines and expectations within the classroom. The reason I think the quality of the feedback I received could have been improved by a holistic approach, is that if those involved in the book look had a good understanding of what goes on in my classroom and how I use feedback to push learning on, comments on spelling and other aspects of the curriculum could have been framed in a more informed way.

What I learned 2: The value of professional dialogue in order to maintain criticality

The importance of middle and senior leaders knowing what goes on in individual classroom goes further than simply being able to give accurate feedback; it also creates a relationship of trust, within which professional dialogue can occur and from which all parties can learn.

One of the most interesting pieces of feedback I received following the book look was that, during the drafting process, I could signal to children where they had met the success criteria by highlighting their work in green. A number of my colleagues already do this, and its value seems to have been accepted. However, I have not been doing that, and in the most recent unit of work, I made a decision to not highlight the children’s successes early on in the drafting process. At the time, I didn’t formulate a coherent argument as to why I made the decision; following all the reading I had done around feedback, the podcasts I’d listened to and my own experiences within my class, I just had a gut feeling that my decision was the right one.

Gut feeling may have been enough for me, but following the book look, I began to consciously realise where that gut feeling originated.

Earlier this year, I led a whole-school CPD on teaching to the top, or setting high expectations for all children. The more I think about using the green highlighter early on, the more I am convinced that it caps children’s attainment.

This is not to say that I do not see the value in using green highlighter at all; in fact, I think it’s probably an excellent tool for creating a culture of trust within the classroom and building a bond with individual children, as well as boosting confidence if necessary. I suppose my criticisms of it come in part from the fact that I have taught my class for two years, and therefore that relationship of trust is already established. Perhaps then, green highlighter could be used at the beginning of the year and the children could be slowly weaned off it.

Further, I absolutely accept the value of celebrating children’s success. Again, had a holistic approach to the book look been taken, perhaps the green highlighter comment would not have been made: I have a proud wall, which displays not only children’s final products, but also where children have responded brilliantly to feedback within the drafting process, or gone over and above that feedback through being critical. Children are constantly sent to colleagues and SLT to show off their work and progress, as well as having their work sent home with letters from me. I think celebrating children’s success is essential, but it must come at the right time.

So, where did the green highlighter comment go wrong? Essentially, I believe it caps children’s attainment:

• it can encourage children to rest on their laurels: if they’ve already achieved a high standard, why expend effort trying to improve? Why risk losing that green highlighter?
• equally, just because something has achieved the success criteria, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. Why allow children to stop improving their work just because it’s met the success criteria? Moreover, if they’ve achieved a high standard within the first draft, let’s consider what they could achieve with a bit of constructive guidance. 
• Promoting a culture of scholarship. This was one of my targets from my NQT plan and I think that highlighting children’s successes too early on actively hinders such a culture. Some children may achieve a very high standard within the first draft. Does that mean I should highlight everything in green? Where does that leave them? Doesn’t that promote what can be perceived as pure talent over hard work? Is that compatible with growth mindset?
• Critical thinking, risk taking and writer’s voice. Too often, children are told what is good and not good, and I worry that it stops them from finding their writer’s voice. I want my pupils to not only be able to identify for themselves what a good piece of writing looks like, but also to feel that what they have written is their own. If something they have written is highlighted in green, but upon reflection, they’re not pleased with it, how likely is it that they’re going to change it? The second attempt might have been even better, but my worry is that I would have stifled their creativity because they’ve already achieved ‘good’. Why risk losing that?

The feedback session could have been the perfect opportunity to discuss these issues. Unfortunately, its format was framed in a way which to me, felt quite final: there was a pre-prepared feedback sheet with pre-set targets. It seemed that the space for conversation hadn’t been created. It’s a shame, because engaging in critical reflection with colleagues is so valuable. Further, if I had had that relationship of trust with the assistant head, that conversation may have happened more naturally.

Conclusion: where do we go from here?

I am feeling very positive about the future of books looks for three reasons.

1. I learned so much from it. The above reflections have led me to deeply think about the value of a book look, and how that value can be achieved. I believe a book look must be holistic and it must be a conversation, in order for the feedback to be accurate and actioned.
2. SLT were open to having a conversation with me. While the feedback session was not designed to be a conversation, it ended up being one. Although it felt uncomfortable at first, I wasn’t shut down or ignored. The assistant head took me seriously and we engaged in a lively debate. The best thing is, because we ended up having a conversation, I’m not the only one who learned from the experience. I am thus hopeful that during the next book look, leaders will engage actively and critically with what they’re seeing, linking that to wider research and debates, and frame feedback sessions in a conversational way.
3. The assistant head decided, without any prompting from me, to have another look at my books. Although this won’t make the feedback more holistic, it will make it more valid, as comments won’t be lost in translation. What’s more, the feedback session is more likely to be a conversation because of the precedent set. This shows me SLT is itself open to feedback, and gives me hope that the next book look will be take a more holistic, conversational approach.

The next book look is scheduled for July – let’s revisit then.

To take up or not to take up?

This time last year, I was facing a bit of a professional dilemma. Some context: I was nearing the end of my first year of teaching through the Teach First programme. I had been teaching a year 5 class with whom I’d really bonded. It was a hard year, with lots of ups and many, many downs. Despite this, teaching felt like the right profession for me and I felt incredibly lucky to have found something I loved so quickly.

For a large part of the year, I had assumed I would be remaining in year 5 to consolidate everything I’d learned. However, for a variety of reasons, including a mass teacher exodus, it looked like the school might be facing a vacancy in year 6. It was then that I was asked whether I preferred to take my current class (the only class I’d ever taught) up to year 6 or remain in year 5 with a new set of children. This was a hard decision as I could see the benefits and disadvantages of both options.

On the one hand, keeping my class meant that all the hard work of setting the behaviour boundaries and expectations, building relationships and establishing strong routines had been done, albeit by a totally inexperienced, frazzled teacher. That was the downside: by keeping the same children, I (and they) didn’t get a fresh start. I didn’t get the chance to start the new year with a new group; to start the year as a qualified, confident and skilful teacher.

Further, whilst it would be the case that keeping the same class meant I kept many of the children whom I adored, there were a few who were capable of rubbing me up the wrong way. Keeping them meant they knew how to push my buttons much more quickly than a new class would have. Moving up a year group also meant that I would have to learn a new curriculum, time which could perhaps have been better used to consolidate what I had taught that year.

Nevertheless, staying in year 5 would have meant inheriting a group of children with severe behavioural issues, and to be honest, I didn’t feel equipped to deal with that. I also felt incredibly heavily invested in the children I was teaching and I had a huge amount of motivation to go above and beyond for them. A bit like when you’re in a relationship, and you can’t possibly imagine ever being with anyone else again (however misguided that may be), I just couldn’t see myself making the same sort of effort for another group of children.

Trying to weigh all this up wasn’t easy, but I decided to go with my gut; I knew I wasn’t ‘done’ with these kids, and there were so many things I wanted to try with them. So I moved up to year 6.

So, having decided to take up my class, what have I learned one year on?

1. I still do not know if it was the right decision, but it was certainly one from which I learned a great deal and developed as a professional.

2. If I hadn’t been a strong enough teacher to begin with, keeping my class would not have been good for anyone involved. Keeping the same class did give me a head start on the learning – I didn’t have to spend time teaching routines and setting expectations; they were already embedded. Luckily, the expectations were high and the routines were slick – if these hadn’t been strong aspects of my practice throughout the previous year, that ‘head start’ aspect would have been non-existent. In fact, there would have been a lag, as I would have attempted to readjust expectations and re-teach behaviour, and children would have struggled against these new routines.

3. I’ve seen them grow; but they’ve also seen me grow. The level of trust between myself and the children was incredibly high and this allowed me to be very creative and experimental. Seeing the children grow over the last two years has built a very strong bond between us. Simply witnessing the changes they’ve gone through and being a stable presence in their lives has meant that not only do I trust the children, the children trust me. This means I can try out all the wacky latest teaching trends I’ve seen on Twitter and the children won’t bat an eyelid – they’ll embrace it. I always explain what I’m doing and why, and the children take a huge interest in it. They’ll tell you all about oracy and the importance of retrieval practice.

4. With the right teachers and the right classes, keeping them together for longer could be a win-win. I am heavily invested in their education. Perhaps it’s just my character; perhaps it’s the fact that they’re my first class; perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve kept them for two years. Whatever it is, what the kids have lost in terms of variety, they’ve got back tenfold in dedication. I spend my free time researching, reading, reflecting – and as a result my teaching has developed immensely. On the flip side, the rewards I reap from seeing the progress children have made since year 5 make all that investment worth it. And if I think there’s one thing that others can learn from my experience, it’s this: if we really want teachers to be deeply invested in the education of the children in their care, surely we need to increase the rewards they feel? It’s easy to feel invested in a child when you know you’ll be teaching them for two or more years, and moreover the satisfaction you reap from seeing that progress is so meaningful. If I were a senior leader, this is something I’d be thinking about quite seriously.

5. Being with my class for two years has left me more invested and more rewarded. Bearing in mind that, for the most part, my professional development this year has been self-driven, I have made a huge amount of progress as a teacher. That is due to a combination of things, including: being reflective, having a group of children who’ll just go with whatever it is I’m trying, and being invested in their education. The latter are direct results of keeping the children for longer, and my ability to be highly reflective is also a result of my perhaps deeper-than-average knowledge of the children, due to a vat of memories two years deep and two years wide.

6. Shared memories. When children come across the word ‘catharsis’, I can say: do you remember, in year 5, when we read Street Child…? And the children immediately remember what it means. In a recent observation, I wanted the children to use a better verb than ‘to walk’. All I said was: how did Jim and his sisters move in Street Child? All the children remembered that they ‘trudged’. Having these kind of memories, and constantly bringing them back into play, is not only a nice way of reminiscing; it actively builds their knowledge, forging links between what they have learned and what they are learning now.

So to conclude, can I say whether it was the right decision? No, no one can. But was it a decision which led to improved pupil outcomes, strong relationships and excellent professional development for me? Without a doubt.

The one disadvantage that haunts me is…I can’t follow them up to high school! How will I cope when they go? We shall see, this time next year.