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

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

6Cs - Teachers need to model them before they embed them, surely? A LONG read!

We are in the throws of getting ready for next year. It is a strange time one eye on holiday (however that looks this year!) and one eye on future lessons. Anything can inspire a thought at this time and cause you to wander to your device to sketch out a quick lesson. We were recently tasked with giving teachers guidance on embedding the 6Cs in their lessons next year. We have done this training before, yet if embedding the 6Cs was a set of scales the needle has barely moved.

Why, when we are observing sessions are we not seeing the 6Cs embedded? Are they an abstract concept that staff struggle to apply to their subject? Do staff lack confidence in discussing the 6Cs? Is it just another thing that has been bolted on to a lesson? Are staff unconvinced of their significance?

Short of surveying 100s of staff only to get a less than 5% response rate I'm not sure I will find the answers to my questions. The 6cs have been determined as the core skills our students will need to succeed in the future world. They have been determined by countless surveys, statistical modelling and professors of social sciences. Look over the pond to educators in the USA and for 5 years + they have been developing these student skills. We need to embed them and catch up, fast!

There is a debate over what are the 6cs, as with everything there are lots of opinions. Originally beginning as 4, and those 4 haven't changed, they have now been expanded to 6. Ultimately though at this point in the game any focus on any of the core 4cs is a step towards preparing students for the future. The final 2cs switch in and switch out depending on who you read. We have read LOTS on the 6cs and we work from this list:

Communication

Collaboration

Creativity

Critical thinking

Choice

Curation

As a maths teacher I find it natural to embed most of them into every lesson. Creativity is hard to come by! But they naturally fit my lesson aims and my task design. All I do is amplify  them in my planning. Who wouldn't want to develop a student who was a good team player with creative ideas, who could communicate well? Surely educators chose this career because they want to help shape students to be ready for their future? 

If I was teaching Pythagoras I would model an answer at the board before we began the tasks. What about if I was teaching surds? Yes you guessed it, I would model how I would solve the problem. I would model the best example that I could, with the highest of high standards. As educators we consistently model the behaviour we want to see from our students. We have all said at some point, oh I can get away with wearing that un ironed top today and then found ourselves changing our minds as we leave the front door and racing back in to iron it because we want to model high standards! We have all said to a student "just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you can slam your desk, I wouldn't do that would I?" We model everything we want to see from our learners from behaviour to how we would answer a question. So why aren't we modelling the 6cs?

Communication

We communicate all the time. It would be impossible not to communicate. But do we communicate effectively? Not always! I know I often walk away from a lesson thinking, I wasn't clear enough when I said that. Or I leave a meeting thinking, oh I should have said less in there I waffled and lost my point. Sharing how we communicate with learners and how we construct our arguments is a powerful thing. After I lose my point when talking in class, I will, later on in the lesson, pull the class together to apologise and explain what I was trying to say and how it all went wrong. I share with them my strategies for effective communication. 

When I am creating tasks I am communicating with learners. I am modelling how to communicate via text. I am showing them examples of how to create clear instructions, and ultimately how to communicate clearly. I am modelling communication. When I create comments on their work I am modelling effective communication (I hope?!) to embed communication into my lessons I need to build in opportunities for students to construct their arguments or communicate with peers. 

Peer influences have long been known to have a postive multiplier effect since Hatiie first brought out effect sizes in the classroom. Petty agrees peer influences are key. I think it would be a challenge to now (10 years+ down the line) to argue against the positive effect of peer work or group work. But we all know how wrong group work can go, the same with peer assessment. "Good work" in peer assessment is not helpful. We need to, as educators, set the expectations of peer assessment. Create a model for students to assign roles in group work. We need to create and support opportunities for students to communicate effectively. 

Collaboration

We collaborate all the time as teachers. We might work on classroom posters and displays together. We may work with others when designing the homework strategy for the year. We may even co plan units of work within the department. Yet all of this is behind the scenes. Our learners don't see this collaboration. How can we collaborate in the classroom?  Or tell our learners how we collaborate? 

I was singled out for praise for my collaboration with my in class support staff this year, as in previous years. I have been asked to attend an excellence event at work to share how I achieve such excellence. Unfortunately I disagree. I am not excellent at communicating with my in class support. I share my lesson plan, my resources and my slides with my in class support a week before the lesson. As I order my photocopying of my resources I ping an email with the links in to my in class support. They are all saved in a folder that is shared as well so if I make any changes they can see what's happening. Now my in class support may be a different staff member depending on rotas so I also copy in the team manager of the support team to disseminate. This isn't excellent. This is the bare minimum of human decency. You cannot ask anyone to help you at an event without sharing with them what the outline of the event will be. You can't hold a meeting expecting everyone to bring their best ideas without sharing an agenda of what is to be discussed. So why would you not share the lesson plan with your in class support?

The fact that I am recognised for excellence in this tells me that I am in the minority and this isn't common practice. If it were it would be a great example of collaboration to model to learners. Likewise if you have a student teacher taking an element of the lesson, great collaboration opportunity. And if the student teacher is taking the whole lesson, you can evidence collaboration by engaging in the lesson, rather than taking a break as so often I see. 

What about the 'new normal' and blended teaching? As I have blogged previously I believe that in order to capture the feedback of the lesson in the best way, we will need co teachers to join us. We can show our learners collaboration in sharing other teachers recordings too. Imagine you are following the same scheme of work and week by week each teacher takes it in turns to record their lesson easing the pressure on the others that week. They then share that recording and the student ends up with a variety of different teachers recording to reflect on and go back too. The student will see different styles of communication as well as collaboration in action. 

Creativity

It can be easy to prepare lesson slides, tasks or run with a lesson you have used year after year. It doesn't make it personal to that class nor if you have resitters does it engage them. Yet I see teachers going down the same road year after year. If I'm honest I have done this too! Simplifying fractions is always on the spec and I have a lesson that covers all bases and I could just go with it as is. But every year there are new statistics at the time of the lesson so I will change my examples to the number of people of BAME backgrounds out of The Times 100 richest people. I am creatively thinking of examples. 

I read a lot of blogs, I mean a Lot of blogs. I have over 100 subscriptions to blogs, my inbox barely reaches zero. I like it like that though because the more you trawl what's out there the more golden nuggets that you find. I will see a new Hyperdoc template and think, wow that's good. I will creatively adapt it and use it in my lesson. I may read about a new delivery or questioning style. This may inspire me to create a new approach to scaffolding in my lesson. I am being creative in my approaches to teaching, I am coming up with my own new ideas based on what I see others doing. I am modelling creativity. I know this because year on year student survey feedback is that my lessons are the most creative the students see on their courses. I don't see myself as creative just that I am willing to have a go so no lesson feels stale. 

Critical Thinking

I often sit in a CPD session listening and, on reflection decide whether or not it was for me. I critically evaluate the techniques or concepts the presenter was asking me to consider and I rationalise my own thoughts and think "OK but is it for me?" I critically think in meetings about plans for next year and I think, we may need to consider these factors too. I am creatively thinking of solutions and I then communicate them with the rest of the meeting. Critical thinking is part of everyday. We don't watch hair adverts and think, yes that is the best product for my hair! We critically think about the pros and cons of the products and whether it is for us. 

We will have critically thought about all the ways of delivering our lesson and ultimately decided on what we feel is the best way. I take this a little further and I share with my learners the routes we could have gone down. I explain the pros and cons and consult them on whether they are happy to trust my judgement of if they want to explore another way. I realise this may not be appropriate for everyone but it is the way I embed critical thinking. If I had a debate subject where arguments could be judges I would have a more natural way to embed it too. We model critical thinking in every lesson, but do we tell our learners how the evidence and our thought process delivered us at our route? 

Choice

Building on critical thinking naturally leads to choice. We had a choice in how to deliver our content and we made our choice. Yet we can still give the learners a choice too. When I teach ratio I teach 3 or 4 methods to solve exam problems. I give them a choice. They critically think about each method and choose the one that is right for them. Every learner learns differently and I ask them to respect this and let me explain all 4 choices before they choose. We choose what clothes we wear. We choose what we have for lunch. We choose our tasks. 

We create options for tasks. We rarely adopt a one size fits all approach to tasks and we offer students a choice. I see good and less good examples of this in lessons all the time. The good explain the choice and what is expected and if there are varying levels of difficulty or not. The less good simply use the same tasks but phrased differently or on different coloured paper. Students had a choice to come to our lesson or not, yes there would be consequences if they chose the latter but they had a choice. We should reward that choice by continuing to offer them high quality choices throughout our lessons. 

Curation

This is the skill that I am most passionate about developing for students. As a mum I see my son bombarded with videos and content on Netflix, YouTube Kids and hundreds of channels on Sky. How does he know what to watch? How does he know what is good? How do I help him curate the content? I see it as our responsibility as educators to help students curate the overwhelming amount of content that is available to them. Never mind it being a crucial skill needed for the future workforce. 

We curate our resources before we begin the lesson. We choose what we think is a good example. We wade through Twitter and pick out shiny things that attract us or inspire us. We can successfully navigate the complicated world but do we take time to share our skills and expertise with our learners? We can, and do, curate but do we model it for our learners? 

I was guiding my learners through revision recently and googled circle theorems. I then went through the results page verbally explaining my decisions for highlighting certain websites. UK based ones or gcse level ones rather than A Level and so on. My learners were scribbling down everything that I said. They enjoyed learning how I curate. I now know I need to model more of this for my future classes as well as getting them to curate as well. 

I use Google Classroom as my hub for my classes. I keep it lean. I only post content that fits under one of my topics: algebra, number, shape, stats, revision and class admin. Sure I see new student websites daily that I could forward on to them but I would end up bombarding them and ultimately they would switch off. I was helping a teacher tidy up her Google Classroom last week and I asked her what she wanted to keep to copy for next year. Her response was, well all of it. How can all of it be relevant? She hasn't met next year's students, she doesn't know how they like to learn. How will next years students navigate this collection of ideas and resources? It needed curating. We do curation behind the scenes in class but we can model it more in class too, can't we? 

I realise the aim of embedding the 6cs is to get learners to practise and develop the skills for themselves. But how can we do that and get their buy in if we are not modelling the skills first? We get that right and the rest should follow. SJ

Planning for next year... this is it!

This is it, it's finally happened! We have been asked to start thinking about next year! We are out of our reactive COVID-19 mode and into proactive COVID-19 mode, we have moved on. I cannot tell you how excited I am. I am obviously sad that this year's learners courses ended the way that they did and I wish things could have been different. This is now the new normal though. 

I love a list. I love a plan. I always see, if it's not written down it won't happen in your lesson. I have made a list, a list of all the bits that are good about being in a physical classroom and the less good bits. 

Less good bits:

Struggling to walk round tables when you have 30 in a class and only 15 are meant to fit in the room. 

Waiting for the projector to warm up/changing/cleaning the fliter

Losing the projector remote and having to climb on the desk

Grey muck on the whiteboard from not being cleaned properly

Negotiating towers of paperwork or work in progress

Waiting for the class before to finish and only having 5 minutes to get set up for your class

Good bits:

Seeing students

Seeing student reactions

Responding to students

Going outside for a private 1 to 1 with students

Live feedback/marking 

Display boards

Singing and dancing together

I want to plan a way to build in as many good bits of physically being in the classroom as possible. Seeing students and responding to them, sure I can see them on a Google Meet but I need to make sure I take time to see them. How do they look? Are they happy? Are they engaged? I love a progress check. You can't go more than a few minutes in my lesson without falling over one. I want to capture this and give myself time to respond. Tools like Slido or Pear Deck are going to be more valuable to me now. I will treasure that feedback even more. I need to consciously build in time for me to react to that in my lessons. 

Private 1 to 1s. My 19+ learners and my 16-19 learners come to class with all sorts of baggage. My job is to help them unpick it or pack it up. If we can fix it we can, we will stop, go outside and fix it. If we can't we will box it up and move on so we can focus on the lesson. I need a way for students to open up to me or a place I can take them if I spot something is troubling them. I'm going to make a pastoral Google Meet and a lesson Google Meet. If I see the need for a private chat I will ask the student to pop out and join the pastoral Meet. I will offer the pastoral Meet as a drop in too for learners. I can't wait for Google to introduce breakout rooms in Google Meet but my plan is worth a try for now. 

I think Pear Deck and Slido can help me with live marking and feedback but I want to do more. I want to recreate that connection between me and my learners. I will try to record them a little voice note or video after the lesson as an overall feedback. I will use my reports from Pear Deck and Slido as well as student work to help. I will need to make notes during the lesson on everyone to help too. 

I think I will make a virtual noticeboard in Google Slides using the template from Slides mania. I will pin my famous female mathematicians, my examples of student work and my other bits and bobs. I will post it to Google Classroom and set myself a reminder to refresh it every term.

I will still sing and dance, if I'm honest the learners don't normally join in with me anyway so I will continue to do this on my own! 

I cannot recreate my physical classroom nor the experiences we share in it but I can create opportunities for us to create new experiences. I have discovered before how much effort goes into planning online lessons and going through these lists I am reminded as to why. We need to plan opportunities, then we need to plan where those opportunities will lead us to. We need to plan how we will converge onto the same end point from these discussions and we need to plan in time to check in on our learners. 

It may seem early to start planning for next year as we still have half a term to go. But looking at the list of extra things we need to plan for I think we need to start now. SJ

Collaborative Planning

I love planning, almost as much as delivering sessions. Be them staff CPD or teaching. I enjoy planning. I don't enjoy finding the time to sit and plan but once I have cleared my mahoosive to do list I enjoy the process of planning. I plan to the nth degree. I plan for every possible twist and turn a session can take, well I try to! Now we are in an age where we collaborate on planning...do others plan the same as me? No! Do others deliver the same as me? No! I've had to do a lot of letting go, and I still have more to do but I have learnt along the way.

In 2016 I was asked to plan the whole student course for my subject. I dutifully sketched out a plan on Google Sheets. For no other reason than I only had a Chromebook at home. I came into work and my manager said, "oh share that with me." So I did. Unbeknownst to me he then shared it with every staff member in the team, mentors, coaches, TA's and teachers. Everyone threw their two penneth in and the next time I looked at it the document didn't resemble anything like I had planned. Thankfully I used version history to revert to my version, saved a copy for me, restored their version and moved on doing my original plan. I hadn't been asked to collaboratively plan and I wasn't ready to let go. I knew what my end vision was but we hadn't discussed it as a team. I wish we had and I wish we had been given the time but we weren't and I felt that I had to just move on with my plan.

In 2017 I was asked to plan with the same team again. I established from the beginning some roles and duties with my manager. I added columns with each staff members name on and we began. Three weeks later, nothing. Not a sausage. No one contributed. I asked my manager what to do and he said, just do what you did last year. So again I wrote my version of what I thought should happen for our learners in the coming year. Instantly the sheet was filled with thoughts, tweaks, changes and amendments. It ended up in a mess. I tried to tidy it and move bits under each person's column but it still wasn't a practical document. For example, I would pop the session title in and some key bits to cover. There would be an extra row added from the mentor saying that she was on holiday that week. There would be a comment added by the other teacher from the other group saying they wouldn't cover this then as they had their own plan. In the column under her name the mentor wrote "Student B didn't like this topic last year, can they do something else?" You get the picture. Not a practical document in terms of something to pick up and run with in the classroom. Most of the teams contributions had some merit or relevance. My manager hadn't asked us to collaboratively plan though. He had asked staff to contribute to my plan. They weren't invested, it wasn't their end vision.

In 2018, my last year with the team, I was asked to start planning again. This time I added a column for key dates, meetings, trips, staff absence, hoping this would avoid extra rows being added. I added a column for the other teacher to put her topics in to see when she taught what and to see if we could move some stuff around to tie up a bit. I added a hooks column and asked staff to contribute. The hooks were meant to be things that were exciting about that topic in the real world. I was hoping that by focussing on how to engage learners we would avoid the negativity of Student B didn't like this comment. Again I sat and waited with my blank document of columns, nothing. I added in my part. Nothing. I tracked down the other teacher, we sat together and we came up with a plan where we both taught the same topics each week. We then talked about sharing the planning and resources. We recognised we both taught differently but agreed the resources would always be similar so shared the planning of those taking a week each. We then asked our manager to share the document again in the team meeting, we asked him to ask the team to contribute to our plan. On paper copies everyone else contributed and I typed them up onto the document afterwards. We ended up with a column for my class, a column for the other class, a column for who was responsible for planning, a column of hooks and a column for key dates. It was beautiful.

In the beginning my manager had mistaken the fact that a document can be shared for a collaborative document. I wasn't asked to collaboratively plan and not were the rest of the team. They probably felt aggrieved that I had planned so much of it already without asking. In 2017 I learnt that the team didn't didn't believe we were collaboratively planning. They hadn't been asked to. They felt, rightly, that they were contributing to my plan. We still didn't get it right but by sitting down and discussing things we moved a lot faster and closer to what we were trying to achieve in 2018. We never truly collaboratively planned. We contributed to a shared plan.

Collaborative planning is more than working on a shared document. It is about setting working parameters, assigning roles, discussing and aiming for the end goal and vision. Everyone will come to planning from a different viewpoint. You need to agree and establish what it is you are aiming for as a group to then allow the plan to support your vision. Without roles and an end vision established collaborative planning will probably always end up in a mess like my 2016 document.

Things have moved on since then and now we are asked to virtually collaboratively plan. Unfortunately I am seeing documents being shared with "pop any bits you want to add on", that isn't collaborative planning. That is sharing a document and asking for ideas. Collaborative planning, virtual or face to face needs a planning meeting, an opening discussion. This doesn't have to be face to face, it can be on a Google Meet. It doesn't even need to be a meeting, it could be an opening email of "we are about to start planning...and I wanted to see what roles and ideas everyone wanted to bring." It gives everyone an opportunity to get their barriers out of the way. An opportunity to establish roles. An opportunity to clarify and aim towards the same end point. It's personal!

However if your email is looking mahoosive and you fear that the focus will be lost, you may want to pick up the phone. You will be surprised what a difference it makes hearing people's voices rather than reading their words and it may make planning a more enjoyable experience. SJ