Read and Write by Texthelp

I am yet to teach a student who is overjoyed to be singled out for their differences and openly welcome interventions in front of the whole class. It maybe because I teach FE. My learners want to join in with their peers first and they worry about the additional support they may need second. The skill of the teacher is to provide timely and meaningful support to the student with additional needs in a quiet purposeful manner. I'm not saying I run covert operations in class and there are secret side conversations happening. That would be an awful environment for the rest of the class! No, what I do is provide the extra resource or support to the learner and say, "that's for you to look at when we do... " that additional resource could be a Chrome book because the learner needs formula prediction on Equatio mathspace. It could be a dictionary of English to their home language. It could be a blank comic strip template to help them visualise and structure their answers. It could be a completed comic book template of the lesson sequencing my planned activities so they know what to expect and when. It could be a set of headphones so they can listen to white noise to help them focus. It can and should always be what the learner needs to help them achieve in my lesson. If it doesn't help then deal with the barrier they are facing it isn't relevant.

Most learners in my classroom have only recently had a diagnosis of additional learning needs. I teach FE, which includes adults who have returned to study post 40 who suddenly discover they have an attention disorder or dyslexia or a variety of needs. It is such a common occurrence that exam access arrangements expressions of need begin in September and have a deadline of January to allow for thorough assessment before the March deadline. Last year in a class of 14, 8 adult learners required exam access arrangements. This later in adult life diagnosis means my learners are even less inclined to be seen as different or needing something extra to help them but if the support is relevant to their need, in my experience, they are willing to give it a go.

I was overjoyed when we got Read and Write from Texthelp (this is not a paid for post nor is it an ad) we had a customisable solution to give everyone a fighting chance to overcome their barriers to learning with one click. I am aware other products exist but none in my opinion have the wide range of features I will tall about. Imagine a lady in her 60s. Proud grandma whose grandson is starting high school. She returns to study GCSE maths so that she can help him with his studies and achieve a qualification she never passed. Imagine through discussion with me that we discover she struggles to read and stay focused when using a screen. We hop on a chrome book and use the screen masking feature on the Read and Write toolbar. But that's not the end. Later she discloses she's stopped using it, when I ask why, she is overwhelmed by the buttons on the bar. I am crushed. Quickly I hop onto data desk and personalise her bar with her input. We end up with just 5 buttons all relevant and personal to her. She is back on track.

Just because we find an amazing tool doesn't mean it does the job for us. We wouldn't buy the same textbook for every class and not direct students to certain chapters or pages. We can't leave Read and Write to do it all. It does a lot of the heavy lifting, but we need to help. We need to personalise the experience for our learners to make the additional support relevant, which is where the data desk feature come in. The beauty of Read and Write is that it is there whenever a learner needs it. They don't need to ask. We are providing a meaningful and timely support that helps overcome barriers to learning. SJ

Streaming and setting

I may have mentioned, I teach maths! Setting and streaming was my life when I worked in schools and we have begun introducing it in FE. The thought and theory behind it is the closer the students are in ability the easier it is for the teacher to teach, right? I am the teacher that has argued in staffroom that it's just not possible to teach maths gcse to a mixed ability group! That was me! Recently my child has been streamed in primary school. Not in year 6 ready for assessing, they have been streamed in reception and in year 1. This is due to the tiny nature of our small local school which physically doesn't have large enough classrooms. No one is doing this through choice! But sadly this is something happening in friends schools too and something that will continue throughout these very young children's educational journey. 

My child was streamed and instantly their friendship groups were decimated. Year 1, the start of their education journey. Those friendships were to be dissolved. Those friendships supported by family walks in lockdown socially distancing to keep them all chatting, those friendships, gone. It instantly made me question was this right for my child? They were going to be taught in a class where less differentiation would be needed, all the teachers are lovely, the classrooms are similar, my child was going to be appropriately stretched. Surely I was happy with this as an educator?

It was actually after the kids were in bed when my husband turned to me and said he was devastated that those friendships were to be dissolved. I put a brave face on and said they can still play at break time, only to realise that they were to join a new COVID bubble and there would be no mixing. Was it just the friendships I was concerned about? Yes but they are not just friendships at this age. They are one of the corners of what we are trying to build in our children's education, it is a vital part of educating the whole child.

This starts with pupils being taught about what a relationship is, what friendship is, what family means and who the people are who can support them.

Relationships Education also creates an opportunity to enable pupils to be taught about positive emotional and mental wellbeing, including how friendships can support mental wellbeing.

This is lifted straight from the Phse guidance by the government, updated within the last 12 months. I'm not wrong then, friendships are a vital part of their education at such a young age. In class they are going to learn the importance of friendships. How confusing will this be that their friends are no longer with them and they are having to start again aged 5?

I began thinking about the differentiation aspect. I have long been a fan of group them together and teach to the majority and sprinkle a bit on for the top and scaffold for the bottom. Hats and mats were the lifeblood of my PGCE! But things have changed. I now teach in FE where even with an effort or nod to streaming the range of ability in groups can be as wide as the grand canyon. So I have learnt to adapt. I have learnt how to personalise learning more. I love a choice board to help with this. I curate appropriate resources for a variety of levels and offer students a choice. I love to sing 'I don't care how you get here just get here if you can' What I mean, when I torture my students ears, is that I aim to empower my learners to choose how and what they learn to arrive at my end point for them in the session.

Technology has moved on. When I started teaching we photocopied 15 mats sheets 5 hats and 10 lats sheets for every session. Prizes for working out hats mats and lats if they are a new term for you! Hats... High attainers... Mats middle attainers... Lats low attainers. Technology has moved on and yes I still photocopy (until gcse maths stops being linear and paper based I have little choice!) but I also offer a choice. Some lessons it may be written on the board, this one is good if you want to practise this skill, try this one if your feeling like this, and so on. Sometimes it will be a piece of paper colour coded with a key. Sometimes it's a Hyperdoc. I create a table and insert links into each cell. I assign it to students and they colour in the cells as they progress.

I was asked today if I change my approach when teaching pre 16 or 16-18s or my approach to teaching 19+ learners. No, I don't. I don't change the content as we are still learning GCSE maths. I may change the levels of differentiation as the younger groups may be more close together in ability but I won't change the activities too much. We have the same level of gamification in my adult learner class as we do in my pre 16 class. We still get sweets for critical thinking answers or descriptions. We are motivated and engaged with a variety of stimulus. You will be surprised how competitive a Quizizz can get with a group of adults! Maths is still hard, it's hard for 14-16s becuase it is a pressurised subject, their whole future depends on this subject along with English (it doesn't but we as a society make them feel like that!) it is hard for 16-18s because they haven't passed it at the right grade already, essentially they believe they have failed it (they haven't (if you had failed maths you would gave got a U, getting a 3 is not a fail!!!) but we as a society make them feel like that!) it's hard for 19+ learners as they can't do something or move onto something in their journey to higher education or career progression because they don't have that magic pass at grade 4 in maths. 

Although the lessons are very similar between the age groups my choice boards are harder for my adult learners. They have an overwhelming desire to answer every question! Admirable, but I have long lost the notion that you practise the skill once mastered for the rest of the lesson. I am a big fan of interlaved practise. Learn the skill, master the skill, have a bit of a practise and learn a new skill, practise all the old skills and then we learn another one. My adults though, master the skill and want question after question on the same skill. It is a battle to say, practise in your own time, maximise your time with me, let's push on.

I demonstrated choice boards in a staff CPD session recently. I honestly didn't give them a secing thought. They are my natural way of doing things now but I was enlightened by the experience. Just because we use something all the time doesn't mean it isn't t new to someone else! I was inundated with requests for my 'template'... My template! Ha! My template was a 3 x 3 table inserted into a Google doc. In each cell I typed, lesson slides, task 1 etc and hyperlinked them to the resource. I was amazed how many people wanted the 'template'. I asked one teacher why was she so keen, she said she would never have thought to colour code the cells as they moved on and has never given adult learners a choice before because they always want more questions of the same skill to practice. My template had inspired her to find a solution to the same problems I have experienced.

Technology has enabled me to bridge the differentiation gap in my maths classroom. I am able to enthuse and inspire learners with all sorts of new ideas. I can now say that I don't feel the need to stream my students as much. Clearly I can't differentiateacross the whole grades 1-9 and have a grade 1 learner sat with a grade 9 learner. Can I? It would be possible I think but it would be exhausting in terms of my level of planning! I currently differentiate scross grade 2 learners to grade 5 which is a wide range! I'm OK with this range though and curate resources to support all of my learners. I can plan for a wider range of abilities using something as simple as a choice board. I can build that interleaved practise with something as simple as a retrieval grid. I have the tools to enable me to plan and share with ease. I love to do a screen cast when I am planning to orate my thought process. I share it with staff I am mentoring and they find it useful to understand my rationale. I also like to do it for my students. I've picked this task here because when the question comes on the exam it is worded like this... I definitely wouldn't attempt this unless I felt that I had mastered this task first. You get the idea.Technology enables me to do this. 

Last year in my adult gcse class you would have regularly seen 2 or 3 learners sat with headphones on staring at their phones mid way through my lesson. I was very much a no phones allowed teacher when I started, I had a phone prison box too! But things move on, technology has moved on. My learners weren't watching Tik Tok, they were watching a play list I had made on YouTube of the 3 different ways to tackle the type of problem solving exam question we were looking at in class. Or they were editing maths in Equatio mobile ready to submit on Google Classroom. Or they may have actually been been on TikTok watching a cute maths hook on problem solving! The fact I don't need to book a laptop trolley 3 weeks in advance and all of this can be done on a phone enables me to give my learners more choice. Technology has enabled this choice. 

I was discussing this blog post as I wrote it with the brilliant and amazing Iain from Driving Digital. @iainthomp. He made some valid points on streaming and setting, the guy is a legend! He said he didn't get it as a concept! He teaches sport so less prescribed between grades, maybe? He then applied to a work context. If you were to be grouped at work for a task would you group all the underoerforming staff together? Nope! You would need some stronger staff to make sure the tasks got done. He has a point! Socially, do you surround yourself with people who all think the same as you and whom all have the same educational backgrounds? Nope! Some people might but I hope they are in the minority and society is more inclusive! You have a mix of friends through experiences you had (yes some might be from uni etc but they will be part of a wider mix) Are we passing on biases to our students by streaming? Does it create or support a belief that society is better fragmented and apart based on certain criteria? 

I'm not sure I think streaming is right anymore. I'm not sure it is aligned to the ethos of fair education for all that I am striving to deliver. Because I can give my learners more choice, through the opportunities technology has created, I can't see the need anymore to stream as definitively and decisively as I have pushed for previously. Things just move on, if a business didn't reflect and adopt it would fail. Education cannot fail. SJ

Planning Sessions 2

I hope you enjoyed my mistakes in my previous planning debacle! My driving digital buddy is right, it's good to make mistakes. I make a lot! I wanted to follow up on my nightmare planning with some practical tips I wish I had remembered when planning the afore mentioned CPD session!

Starting points are key. I really like the post it notes of what you think/hope to achieve in the session as a starting activity. Obviously there is a risk the responses might not be as you anticipated and a back up plan is needed (I wish I heeded my own advice!) But how do we make the post it note activity more robust? 

Robustness is worth delving into a bit. We don't live in a perfect world (gasp!) We can't always do what we want to do. Take the ultimate dream of a self marking free text assignment, the technology just isn't there yet. I have some products on trial that are close and am excited to see when these are launched! We have to make what we do have available as robust as possible. A multiple choice quiz can be viewed and treated like a cop out, an easy way to assess. Yet I am a huge advocate of the reduced marking of a self marking quiz. So what we need to do is make the quiz as robust as possible. We can use it as an opportunity to address and diagnose misconceptions. For example, a quiz on angles in triangles may use 360 or 90 as misconceptions in the multiple choice quiz. From here we can try to diagnose of the student knows the rules but is confused, the 360 option or if they are lost completely, the 90 option. A crude example but I hope that you get my point. If you are restricted by technology or circumstances in pursuit of your assessment aims try to add some robustness.

So to make our post it note activity more robust, why don't we get participants to sign their notes so we can track who said what? Or even better why don't we make it digital? Slido or Pear Deck, you choose! I like Pear Deck but for adult CPD sessions I prefer Slido. Staff that I work with tend to prefer Slido as we don't have premium Pear Deck. I see merits on both systems. Old schoolers like Mentimeter and Nearpod. Point is make it as robust as you can.

I'm going to talk about Slido as on reflection it probably is my go to tool. I like to ask a question at the start and end on Slido to track and record though processes and changes in a session. It works well as a checkpoint too. But Slido becomes really robust and powerful for me when I add in a word cloud feature. We create a word cloud based on responses at the start and the same again at the end. I love it when different words come to the fore, I love it when the main word is one I really wanted to drive home!!! 

I stand by start and end points being key combined with a skipping forward and looping back approach. Slido will give you the evidence to inform that planning. So will post it notes but who likes paper? SJ

Planning sessions1

I am a little sad in that I love planning a good lesson. I mean a really good lesson. You know the one when you walk in and pretty much you can see how it will go. That's not to say there won't be some curve balls along the way but you can visualise the lesson. Most of my lessons now are staff CPD rather than traditional subject lessons. I don't think that makes a difference as such, staff want the session to finish quicker as they want to get back to work. Students want the session to finish quicker so they can get back to enjoying life. Staff don't make notes because they don't want to be seen as a geek. Students don't take notes because they have super powerful brains that retain everything they hear. Maybe I've misunderstood why students don't take notes, but we will leave that there!

Planning a good lesson isn't just about the sequencing it's about having a clear start and end point. I mean an explicitly clear start and end point. The start point is established and documented. Perhaps it's a pre learning task done independently, it could be a post it note discussion at the start of the session or it can be a dictated start point by circumstance, i.e. it is a brand new topic. The skill is to predict this start point. The challenge is to react and adapt when the start point is different to what you predicted! 

Sometimes when I see trainee teachers teach, things don't go to plan at this start point. The students are further ahead than they expected, they can already answer the content that is planned for later in the session. Even worse is when the students can't even access the start point and have no chance of doing the rest of the lesson. Experience as a teacher tells you in both these situations you rip up the lesson plan and do a pen and paper lesson freestyle and adapt to the learners need. Trainee teachers don't have this experience, some experienced staff wouldn't feel able to abandon their beautiful lesson either. I often see across all staff a curriculum driven agenda of delivery. Not that this is wrong, if we don't cover the content in the curriculum the learner won't achieve the outcome of the course, I get it. But that curriculum can be delivered fast or slow, leaping forwards and skipping back to meet the needs of the learner. All too often we deliver a linear agenda of our curriculum content.

Misunderstanding starting points was almost fatal for me in a staff CPD session recently. I was told that the starting points were determined by circumstance as staff had no prior knowledge and to start at the beginning. I knew staff had seen similar training before and it couldn't be a zero base start point so I made a few tweaks and went in. I came out battered, bruised and exhausted!!! Some staff were below zero base and couldn't login to their devices as they had never used a trackpad before and refused to use it now as it didn't look and feel like a mouse. Some staff had listened to their first training session and refused to engage in my session as it was beneath them. Even worse, I inadvertently, by starting from a base point of zero gave them the false impression that they were now experts as they knew more than the taught content I delivered.

It was a car crash. I tried to adapt mid session and push forward for the more advanced ones but I didn't have a login for the next part of the system and it all went wrong! On reflection I hadn't planned how I was going to adapt. I had planned a great session. I knew the start point (!) And I knew where I wanted the end point to be. All the stuff in the middle was excellent, honest! I even had checkpoints built in. But I had no plan for what if they don't achieve this checkpoint? Or what if they exceed the required knowledge for the checkpoint? I hadn't planned that in. I tried to rely on experience and adapt but because I hadn't planned it I couldn't access the IT system I needed.

I had planned a linear delivery. I needed to have planned a skipping forwards and looping backwards delivery. So I changed the way that I plan. I am laughed at for being a Google Certified Trainer and still relying on paper so much but I do! I write (on paper) across the middle of the page the linear plan of the session. Start to finish a sequence of what will happen. I then scribble around it with arrows of if this bit bombs I can go back and do this bit. If this bit goes really well I can skip and do this bit. It looks a mess! But it's a beautiful mess reflecting the thought process and care that I have put into planning for my learners be them staff or students. 

Starting points are tricky. If you set pre learning, give yourself enough time to review, reflect, and adapt you planning based on the pre task results. It's no good if the students have a deadline of Monday for your Tuesday session, realistically do you or would you be willing to scrap your beautiful lesson plan in that short period of time?

Do you have a back up plan in place for if your bell work or starter activity doesn't get students to the starting points that you had planned?

Have you checked that the circumstances you have been told about are correct? Will the stating point be zero? I wish I had checked mine! SJ