It seems like a life time ago but this time last week I should have been at ResearchEd, listening to great speakers and getting butterflies about my session later that day. Except that I slipped on the hardboard down on the kitchen floor courtesy of our kitchen refit and ended up in A&E instead.  Luckily nothing is  broken and my leg is slowly getting better. I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there.

A few people asked if I could put my slides up. The problem was I had taken Oliver Caviglioli’s work on dual coding  very much to heart and knew that written text and spoken text delivered together can overwhelm the working memory whereas the brain deals much better with spoken text alongside images. My slides where therefore 99% word-free but  image rich, the intention being that I would explain the slides verbally without recourse slides full of bullet points. What I was going to say was in my head rather than written down. The trouble being that without some sort of narration, the slides are hard to make sense of.  So what follows is a a blog based on what I would have said, though probably a bit longer than the 40 minute slot would have afforded.  I’ve used many of Oliver’s excellent graphics in my slides.

Does the best learning result from memorable experiences?

Children tend to easily remember exciting things such as plays and trips.  This leads some teachers to suggest that the key to getting children to remember things is to make lessons full of exciting, memorable experiences. While not an unreasonable supposition, it is based on a misconception about how remembering works. The misconception arises because most teachers are unaware of  the difference between semantic and episodic memory.

Episodic memory is where we store the ‘episodes’ of our life, the narrative of our days. This is the autobiographical part of our memory that remembers the times, places and emotions that occur during events and experiences.  We don’t have to work hard  or particularly  concentrate to acquire episodic memories, they just happen whether we like it or not. When we talk about having fond memories or an event being memorable, we are talking about episodic memory. We are talking about something that happened, something where details of time, place and how we felt at the time are central.

Semantic memory  is where we store information, facts, concepts.  These are stored ‘context-free’, that is, without the  emotional and spatial/temporal context in which they were first acquired.  These type of memories take effort, we have to work to make them happen. In fact, we don’t tend to use the word ‘memories’ for this kind of stuff, we tend to use the word ‘memorise’. After all, we don’t say ‘I have memories of the 7 x table’ we say ‘I have memorised the 7 x table.’

Episodic memory is, at first glance, the more ‘human’ of the two, the memory of people, feelings and places that makes us who we are. Semantic memory seems colder, more robotic.  More Mr Spock than Dr McCoy.  Yet it is our amazing ability to store culturally acquired learning in our semantic memory that makes as so successful as a species.  The key purpose of education is to build strong semantic memory, to pass on the knowledge built up over centuries to the next generation; how to read and write, how stories work, how to use mathematical reasoning to solve problems, science with its amazing power to gives us to predict the future and the myriad of other concepts, ideas and practices. That is not to say that building semantic memory is the only purpose of education. We want to help form children who are emotionally literate and morally responsible too, and that will involve thinking about the kind of episodic memories we try and build for our children. If we treat our children with kindness and respect, they will have episodic memories of  what it was like to be treated kindly and respectfully, which makes it more likely they too will treat others with kindness and respect themselves.  Nor is it to say that there should be no consideration of creating the kind of memorable experiences that trips and plays and so forth afford.  Such special events that punctuate the day to day routine of school life are the festivals, the ‘Christmas dinner’ of the school year. They are special because they are infrequent and resource-heavy and different.  They contrast with the every day, bread and butter hum drum familiarity of ordinary school life. But the every day is our core purpose.

Episodic memories may be acquired effortlessly, but they come with several drawbacks in terms of acquiring skills and knowledge.

Episodic memories come tagged with context. In the episodic memory, the sensory data – what a child saw, heard and possibly smelt during a lesson – alongside their emotions, become part of the learning. These emotional and sensory cues are triggered when we try and retrieve an episodic memory. The problem being that sometimes they remember the contextual tags but not the actual learning.

I’m sure we’ve all had those lessons when children remember all about the colour pens they were using or that we used post its or that Miss spilled her coffee but that actual content of the lesson itself? That’s gone!

Episodic memory is so tied up with context it is no good for remembering things once that context is no longer present. Luckily our brains also have semantic memory. Semantic memories have been liberated from the emotional and spatial/temporal context in which they were first acquired. And once a concept has been stored in the semantic memory, then it is more flexible and transferable between different contexts.

Think about your own learning at school. To be sure you will have some episodic memories of what you actually learnt, but for the most part, the episodic context-dependent aspects have long since faded.  What endures  is semantic memory that you won’t remember  actually learning because the ‘memorable’ context has long been forgotten, episodic brass traded for semantic gold. In this list below, see if you actually recall learning any of this stuff.  Probably not, yet you know it (or most of it) and though maybe you have not thought about ox bow lakes  for decades, at the very mention, back the memory comes, effortlessly.  That’s the beauty of semantic memory . It isn’t, and doesn’t need to be, tied up with episodic clutter. We don’t need to have fond memories of sitting on the carpet in Reception whilst Mrs Blackburn told us all about triangles to know about triangles.

Semantic memory is context free.

Because they are context free, semantic memories are much more flexible and transferable than episodic memories.

So they are much more useful.  Semantic memory is what we use when we are problem solving or being creative because both of these involve applying something learnt in one context to another, novel context. Episodic memories by contrast aren’t flexible and don’t easily transfer because they are anchored in specifics.

Since enabling problem solving and creativity is the ultimate goal of education, it is crucial that teachers have very good understanding of how to ensure that what we teach them stays learnt, that what we impart makes that all important journey from the episodic to the semantic memory. Yet few teachers have had any training on this. What is more, once you start to understand the learning journey, you realise that much of what schools focus on only addresses half (if that) of the learning journey. Our teaching and learning policies and the centrality of lesson observations as levers for school improvement tend to focus on individual lessons, whereas if we know about how semantic memories are formed, we will realise that a lesson is the wrong unit of time  as Bodil Iskasen wrote. (The link to her seminal blog on this does not seem to be working so I’ve linked to David Didau writing about her idea.)

To understand this, we need to understand about how we come to remember stuff. I’ve written about this here and the following slides also remind us of the process. If you are already all Willingham-ed up, you might want to skip this bit.

When we teach something, the information goes first into the working memory and then, in the right conditions, it passes into the long term memory.  Once here, memories can be retrieved back into the short term  memory when we want to think about that particular thing. Hence, although I  have not thought about ox bow lakes very much for 30 years,  I can remember what they are, after all this time. However, as we all are only too aware, the process does not happen quite as straightforwardly as we would like. We teach stuff, yet our students seems to undergo a mysterious mind wipe, sometimes within hours.  Stuff gets forgotten.

Our teaching and learning policies, our cpd and our lesson observations are all focused on the initial learning part of this journey. They pay no heed at all to the second leg; the bit where we remember, or don’t remember stuff beyond the narrow confines of a single lesson.  So sometimes we are baffled when seemingly great teachers get not so great results.  Or possibly vice versa. that’s because we’ve only looked at part of what it takes to learn something in the long term.  We’ve only looked at this.

Or maybe even just this

In other words, we’ve neglected the part of the journey that happens subsequent to the information arriving in the working memory, the stuff that makes knowledge actually stick around long term – an egregious oversight with all too familiar consequences.

Whereas we should also focus on this.

Since lesson observation only focuses on the here and now of a lesson at the point of delivery, it is of limited use in helping see if learning is actually happening. Learning is a long-term process, yet we try and ‘see’ the unseeable by looking at proxies, all of which tell us very little about whether learning is beginning to happen or not, as Robert Coe explains here.

Teaching for long-term learning

If we want to maximise long-term learning, we need to be aware of the three pressure points where our learning may go awry. Traditionally, we have focused on the first of these points and not paid any attention to points two or three.

The  working memory is has very limited capacity and is easily overwhelmed. By contrast, the capacity of the long term memory is vast.  If we want children to remember stuff for the long term, we need to make the most of this huge capacity. The aim of all learning should be to improve long term learning.

The first hurdle, the one we are most familiar with already, is to make sure that what we teach actually makes it to the working memory in the first place.

We remember what we think about, so lessons need to be planned so children think about the right things. If they are thinking hard about what colour pen to use in their poster or how they might win a game, rather than what the poster is about or the maths behind the game, then that’s what they will remember.

This can be a danger with exciting ‘memorable’ lessons. The exciting but extraneous features are what get remembered, rather than the more prosaic, but more important information that we want them to learn.

For example, when teaching young children to count, sometimes using ‘interesting’ objects means the child’s focus is more on the dinosaurs than the counting. So that’s what gets remembered.

Of course the converse is also true. If a lesson is so tedious that all anyone can think about is how boring it is, then that will be what is remembered, at the expense of content.

The second hurdle to be cleared is making sure that the information in the working memory makes it to the long term memory, without leaking out. As Peps McCrea writes in ‘Memorable Teaching’

Our WM is a high maintenance mechanism. Give it too little to play with and it begins to look for more interesting fodder. Give it to much to juggle and it’ll drop all the balls.’

 This is the basis of Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory.

Cognitive overload occurs when we overwhelm the limited working memory with too much new information at once. Since most of us can only handle about 4 new items of information at once, stuff will start to leak if we try and put too much in at once.

We can avoid cognitive load by breaking stuff down into small steps. Unfortunately the ‘curse of knowledge’ makes us forget quite how complicated certain concepts are. See this series of excellent blogs by Kristopher Boulton where he explores breaking down the concept of simultaneous equations into tiny steps to make sure no-one gets lost along the way.

Fortunately, we can ‘hack’ the limits of our working memory. Our brains like to connect together related ideas into chunks. The great news about this our working memory then regards the big ‘chunk’ as one item, occupying one slot.

So for example, when children begin to learn to read, each individual letter had to be decoded, so reading is slow and hard work. If the text is too demanding, the child cannot attend to  the meaning of the text at the same time. Later, the child can decode more fluently because through practice, phoneme-grapheme correspondences have formed a great big chunk called ‘reading’ and getting words of the page takes up very little working memory. The child’s working memory is now fully available to think about what they are reading, rather than thinking about what the words say.  Having secure recall of number bonds and times tables helps students in a similar way have the brain space to think about the new maths they are learning. How many times have children failed to understand vertical addition, for example, because so much brain power is going into adding two 1-digit numbers together that all that stuff about columns and place value you are trying to impart falls by the wayside. When students go to secondary school and learn about the Norman Conquest, they will do so much more easily if the concept of invasion already has some flesh on its bones because they already know about Viking and Roman invasions and World War 2.  Invasion, resistance, conquest and defeat will already be chunked together and understood.

Having a rich store of knowledge available in one’s long term memory ready to be drawn upon by the working memory is therefore crucial.

This is why having lots of rich knowledge is so important. The limitations of the working memory can be bypassed by using the resources of the long term memory.  Those with limited knowledge are unable to do this, so are much more likely to experience cognitive overload.

This has big implications for our curriculum design.  If we want successful learners, instead of over focusing on the quality of teaching, we need to pay attention to the quality of what gets taught.  Is it suitably knowledge-rich?  If instead we focus too much on giving children fun-filled ‘memorable’ experiences, we are depriving them the vital ‘nutrients’ they will need later. It’s equivalent to feeding children on happy meals rather than balanced, nutritious meals. That’s not to say children should never have ‘fun lessons’  at school, anymore than children should never eat junk food or birthday cakes or sweets.

The third and final hurdle is all about retrieval.  Knowledge might have got into to our long term memory, but how easily can we find it?

You know that exasperating feeling when you know you know something but you just can’t remember it right now?  Or you remember (episodically) that you did know something, but can’t bring that thing to mind when you need it.  That’s a bit like when you’ve saved something on the staff drive but didn’t name it properly, let alone put it in a folder where you might stand the faintest chance of relocating it again. Not that that sort of things happens at St Matthias. Oh deary me no.

Let’s hope ‘Doc 6’ wasn’t anything important.

Fortunately, we can do something about this. (About long-term learning that is. The staff drive is beyond help, I fear). We can strengthen our ability to recall long-term memories by retrieving them.  The more you search for a memory, the easier it becomes to find it. This simple concept – the retrieval effect’ – should become the bedrock of our teaching for long term learning.

Unfortunately this effect is also known as the ‘testing effect’ which puts some teachers off and confuses others – myself included until recently – so that we see this as an assessment tool. It is not an assessment tool, it is a learning tool.  I fear my previous blogs on knowledge organisers might have reinforced that misunderstanding. You might get some assessment data as a by product from some retrieval practice but that is not its prime purpose. Its prime purpose is to make memories stronger.

When we struggle to remember something, this primes our brain to remember it more easily the next time we look. The brain gets the message that this memory must be important because we are looking for it.  The more times we try and retrieve something, the stronger the memory gets. But it is the struggle that is important.  If we reteach content instead of getting children to try and retrieve stuff they’ve probably forgotten, the memory does not get strengthened in the same way. It seems kinder but actually does the children no favours. We need to explain this to them and help them understand that struggling to remember something is good – it means their memory is getting stronger.

Some children will fail in their attempt at retrieval. That’s fine. Once they’ve struggled, then you reteach.

One way of helping deal emotionally with the stress of not knowing something is by calling retrieval a game of hide and seek. That pesky knowledge is trying to hide from you, but you are going to try really hard to track it down.

And this is what you can say to children who can’t remember!

And then reteach, to help them get better at finding, next time.

The retrieval effect is stronger if we allow a bit of forgetting to happen before getting children to retrieve. Using our hide and seek analogy, if you only count to 5 before you go and ‘seek’, your friends will be pretty easy to find but your ‘seeking skills’ won’t have had much of a work out.  Count to 50 and your friends will be well hidden and you will have to work hard to find them. It’s the same with memory.  Our memories get stronger once retrieved if we have had time to forget them – bizarre as that sounds.

This is one limitation of  some AfL techniques. If we assess whether children can remember something at the end of a lesson before they have had a chance to forget it then while we get get useful feedback about if they understand something or not – and I’m not knocking that – obviously that’s very important to know – what exit tickets, plenaries and the like can’t tell us is if this new learning will be remembered long term (or even tomorrow).  Afl techniques can tell us about what has been understood, but to know what has been remembered we need something different, we need assessment for long term learning.

Having retrieval tasks at the start of lessons, be they ‘do now’ tasks, entry tickets, start of lesson plenaries or any other retrieval tasks are more likely to strengthen the learning from the previous lesson than and end of lesson retrieval task.

What is more, to make memories really strong, come back to them at gradually increasing intervals. This is known as ‘spaced learning.’

At St Matthias, one way we do this is by giving children multiple choice quizzes weekly during a 3 week block (in humanities or science) and then by giving them another quiz about 6 weeks later when they are deep in the middle of a completely different block. And then at the end of the year (after a period of revision time when they can self-quiz using their knowledge organisers), giving them a final quiz that covers all the areas of learning  in that subject that year. This final end of year quiz does have an assessment purpose too,  but it will also provide further retrieval practice and help the knowledge learned that year endure in the long term.

Here’s a year 6 example

And here’s one from year 2.

Another way of maximising the benefit of retrieval practice is by mixing up the content of what you are asking children to retrieve.  For example, giving children a fractions question from a unit you did a month ago in the middle of a unit on perimeter.

I stress, this is the pattern for  retrieval practice,  and not for the initial teaching of concepts.

We use ‘check its’, an idea we got from the Primary Advantage Federation.  These are short questions from an area that has been taught at least three weeks previously, without any reteaching of the concept beforehand.  For example:

Again, while you could see these as primarily being about assessing what has been retained, we should also remember that as well as helping check what might need reteaching, it also strengthens the memory of what has previously been learned.

Time spent retrieving previous learning is self evidently time not spent learning new stuff. But ploughing ahead with the new without devoting quality time to remembering the old is a false economy. The curriculum is not so much stuff to be covered, it is knowledge for long haul learning. It will pay off in the long term, with less frantic time as high stakes statutory tests approach.  And anyway, the pay off should be for the learner who now has a rich store of knowledge in their long term memory rather than for schools grasping after the badges and stickers of high exam honours, as Amanda Spielman reminds us.

David Didau has just posted a very interesting blog on just this question.  He argues that yes, understanding is actually the very same thing as knowledge; to say that you know something is exactly the same as saying you understand it.

Now I can hear one thousand voices screaming ‘No! No! No!’ and arguing back saying that just because you know that, or can parrot that, 6×7=42 does not mean that you understand it. At all. QED.  Such is the absolute aversion in education to ‘meaningless’ or ‘disembodied’ or ‘dry’ or ‘shallow’ retention of facts as opposed to ‘deep’ understanding, that our automatic rebuttal mode is activated.

But please let me explain.

What does it mean to understand 6×7=42?  I would suggest it means knowing lots of other things too and connecting them together. For example, knowing that 6×7 can be expressed pictorially as an array.

Knowing that 6×7 can be expressed as a bar model.

Knowing that 6×7 is the same as 6+6+6+6+6+6+6

Knowing how to model this on a numberline

Knowing how to model this with cubes

Knowing that all of these examples are equal to the same representations or equations as 7×6

Knowing that 6×7 is the same as 3×6 + 4×6

Knowing how to draw an array to show this

Knowing that 6×7= 7×7-7 and so on.

Every example of ‘knowing’ here could be replace by ‘understanding’ – the two words are interchangeable.

If we know all of these things, we can reasonably be described as knowing what 6×7 means. We understand it. The fact 6×7 is connected to lots of other associated facts.  That’s what understanding is: a load of knowledge connected together. Knowing 6×7 as an isolated fact isn’t very useful; connect it together with all this other information, other knowledge and – voilà – we have our holy grail: deep understanding. AKA knowledge.

So the key here is making sure the individual, ’disembodied’ facts are linked together.  Because teachers have this fear of ‘shallow’ learning, teaching approaches have been drawn up that try and enable ‘deep’ learning from the start.  The problem with this is that the road to deep learning is via shallow learning. You can’t leapfrog over it.  Knowledge becomes ‘deep’ or ‘rich’ or whatever adjective you wish to modify it with when it is connected to other bits of knowledge, but obviously you have to start somewhere. You can’t start with a connection. That would be like trying to build a bridge by building the road before the piers. Shallow knowledge is a necessary step on the way to deep knowledge. We can’t have deep, connected knowledge without remembering a lot of information.

Of course, you could argue that it is useful to reserve the word ‘understanding’ for connected knowledge and retain ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’ for shallow knowledge.  The point is though that understanding is not some mystical other thing beyond knowledge; it is lots of associated knowledge stuck together in a schema.

Who does the sticking, the teacher or the student?

Teachers want above all things for knowledge to be connected, for learners to ‘get it’, to understand it, to link different aspects together meaningfully.  So they will try really hard to design sequences of lessons that make the connections as explicit as possible. That’s what variation theory in maths is all about[1] .  The concrete, pictorial, abstract approach is another way maths teachers enable children to make those all-important connections.   Here’s the thing though.  You can’t brute force connections, however hard you try. [2]  And of course we should try (though not the force bit).  We should try really, really hard.  Those connections are much more likely to be made if they are made absolutely explicit, and if teachers really think about all the little in between bits of knowledge we assume children already have, but in fact might not.  For example, to return to 6×7, some children may not have really understood what a ‘group’ of something is: that you can call 6 things, 1 thing. Without this knowledge, 6×7 won’t make sense to them. A vital connection is missing.  They are more likely to think the answer should be 13, making a more familiar connection, albeit to the wrong thing.  Sometimes wrong connections are made.  Students have false knowledge: knowledge that is wrongly connected.  They don’t understand.  The teacher’s job is to be aware of the likely false connections (misconceptions) and explain carefully so that the right connections are made instead.

Learners themselves cannot force themselves to connect disparate bits of information, even if they know the teacher says they are connected.  The brain just does the connecting – or not – independently of either the teacher’s or learner’s desires. Although of course learners can help matters along a great deal by thinking hard about the things they are trying to connect and teachers can plan their lessons to make sure as much hard thinking about the right things as possible takes place.  My suspicion is though that where students just don’t seem to ‘get it’ it is because some intermediate knowledge is missing that just seems so obvious to us relatively ‘expert’ teachers that we fail to teach it. Either that or because the thing we have just taught is hopelessly entangled with the wrong bits of other knowledge in ways we would never guess so can’t untangle. Or probably both.

Any mistakes in this explanation are of course mine rather than David Didau’s.

[1] See appendix 4. Note how this starts with contrasting memorisation with understanding and the expression of surprise that East Asian countries which major on teacher-led didactic approaches outperform Western countries where such methods are seen as inferior, this apparent paradox is explained by reference to the routine use of ‘variation’ in East Asian didactic teaching.  The teacher explicitly draws attention to connected features.  It’s not that didactic teaching per se is ineffective, it’s when it is done badly, in a way that does not exploit every opportunity to make those connections.

[2] I think this is where the suspicion of so called ‘traditionalist’ ways of teaching kicks in. Teachers worry that this means trying to force knowledge into children’s minds by blitzing them remorselessly with facts as if that was a failsafe solution to learning. Whereas the traditionalist would explain their approach as rich in factual information, but factual information presented in a sequence in which inordinate care has been taken to maximise the probability that the right connections are made (variation) and with similar care also taken to ensure it is broken down into small enough steps that essential prior knowledge is not overlooked.

Whether Sean Harford is winning the war on excessive marking  remains to be seen, but I fear another edu-myth is in the making. A few days ago, a teacher I know remarked that the head of their outstanding school had returned from a heads’ briefing looking pale and anxious.  The briefing had included the warning that Ofsted were now looking for schools to assess all the  foundation subjects and woe betide any school that didn’t. For most head teachers, when you say ‘assessment’ of a subject, they see some sort of excel spreadsheet, full of colour coded figures, of the type we are used to having for maths, reading and writing. The amount of work it takes to test children, mark the tests, get the test data into a spreadsheet and then analyse that data is enormous. It can easily take me a whole weekend to analyse data in these three subjects in sufficient detail to be able to put it into a report for the standards and curriculum committee.  Said head teacher was blanching at the prospect at having to go through a similar process  for 10 other subjects. If that really was what Ofsted wanted, there really would be very little time to do anything else.

However, I knew that Sean Harford had specifically said otherwise. Here is a quote from a recent Ofsted report, brought to our attention thanks to @simonkidwell

The word ‘tracking’ in particular gives the impression of a spreadsheet with numbers, especially when the’ high standards’ of tracking English and maths are praised.  It looks like Ofsted – or at least this particular inspector and those who QA’ed him/her – really do want red, orange and green boxes with numbers in them. But rest assured, Sean says no.

I suggest we all cut out and keep these tweets to wave at Ofsted inspectors as required. As long as assessment is to the same ‘standard’ as  used in English and maths, that’s cool.

Still worried?  What on earth does ‘to the same standard’ mean?  The Ofsted report links these assessments with school leaders and governors (which suggests we are talking about summative assessment; reporting data to show standard are bearing up and good progress is being made)  but also teachers (which points to formative assessment, or responsive teaching, as Dylan Wiliam now wishes he’d called it).  So, presumably our assessment of foundation subjects need to enable responsive teaching and enable others – governors or external visitors aka Ofsted – to hold us accountable for progress and standards for all areas of the curriculum. But not necessarily with numbers.

How then might this be possible without further burdening a workforce already acknowledged as staggering under a crushing workload?  As excessive marking leaves by the front door, are new accountability pressures to assess foundation subjects sneaking in by the back door?

I say ‘new’ because, honestly, I don’t know any school that currently does this. I tell a lie; I know one school where as a hoop jumping exercise they had a simple spreadsheet that RAG’ed children at the end of term in history, geography, RE and science.  They didn’t actually look at the children’s work in these subjects; they made the (probably fairly realistic) assumption that attainment in the humanities would match that in writing and attainment in science would match that in maths; so a simple cut-and-paste operation. Job done!  With the added bonus that whatever data analysis you did for writing was automatically already done for geography.  I would hope that were Sean Harford to read this, he would be screaming ‘NO! NO! NO!’  It’s a completely meaningless task, done with no other reason than to placate the accountability monster by giving them a delicious spreadsheet to chomp on.

If we are going to assess the foundation subjects properly, then we had better do it in a way that – here’s a wild suggestion – leads to children learning more effectively.  This means that  formative assessment – or responsive teaching as we all need to start calling it – must be the driver of any new policy.   But here’s the rub. If we discover that a group of students in year 4 have a dodgy understanding of place value, we will do something about it.  We might spend more time teaching that topic to the whole class, we might change our teaching to use more concrete apparatus,  we might get a TA to run an intervention group towards the end of the day or at lunch or after school, we might send work home to practice or find an app they can use at home. We have termly pupil progress meetings just to discuss such matters.   Imagine we had the same across the curriculum.   Imagine a  discussion bemoaning the fact that little Jimmy might know the 5 Pillars of Islam very well, but was hopeless with the 4 Noble Truths.   What would be do about it?  Say we discovered that a group of children had poor technique in shading with charcoal, would we suggest they came out of maths early three times a week to work with a TA on that?  Would we have after school booster lessons to improve children’s ability to put the events of the Roman occupation of Britain in chronological order.  Would we get children to work with their teaching on mapwork during assembly? Or send woodwork home for extra practise?  Probably not.  Responsive teaching is going to look very different in foundation subjects.  Unlike maths, where concepts  such as place value come up again and again, in history, for example, once the topic on the Ancient Greeks has finished, it’s unlikely to be revisited. If children do not know by the end of the topic the main differences between the Athenians and the Spartans – well that ship has sailed. Now they never will. (Well not on our watch anyway).

Responsive teaching (formerly known as afl)

We introduced knowledge organisers  (KO’s) this year.  By clearly identifying the key knowledge that we expect children to know by the end of a unit, this gives us a way in to assessing whether of not they have done so.  We teach most of our foundation subjects – including the ‘big 4’ of science, history, geography and RE in three week blocks. (Yes, I do know that science and RE are  officially ‘core’ subjects – I’m referring to their de facto status.)  Children  take home a multiple choice quiz  (mcq) each week to go through with their parents for homework with all the answers available on their KO.  Then at the end of the third and final week,  they do a third quiz in school.  This quiz assesses how much of the key knowledge they now know.  This mark (out of 10) is currently only recorded in their exercise book, but it would be very easy -and quick – to put it into a spreadsheet if that is the security blanket we feel we need. I confess that I am feeling that need.  Call me weak. For what is is worth, almost all children score 9 or 10 out of 10 after three weeks of study. But this is summative assessment, not responsive teaching; the unit is finishing as we test them.  If they  do score badly, we have no time left to do anything about it.

Other primary schools who have been experimenting with  KO’s have started each lesson with a very short mcq recapping the key knowledge from the previous lessons as a ‘do now’ activity.  We haven’t been doing this quite as formally, although most lessons start with an oral  recap of key vocabulary, so teachers have some idea if their teaching is resulting in actual learning.  But the ‘do now’ brief mcq is something we need to start doing, not least because we need to teach responsively; i.e. to use feedback from the children to adjust our teaching.  If  very few of the children remember what we learnt about yesterday or last week, we need to respond to that by revisiting that material rather than pressing on to the next idea. We would do this in maths (at least I hope we all would!) so why not in geography or RE?  If revisiting means we don’t cover all the material we were meant to, then so be it. It’s surely better that children actually remember some of the curriculum than cover all of it.

Some schools are also ending each unit with a piece of writing – a non chronological report – summing up what they have learnt over the course of the topic.   While part of me is drawn to that idea, again, if it occurs at the end of the unit as a summative assessment, then our ability to do anything about misconceptions or gaps is limited. Maybe a better idea is to have children write a paragraph (or couple of sentences in ks1) summing up what they have learn so far every three or so lessons, which eventually contribute to a non chronological report.  Older children could then write the introduction and conclusion at the end of the unit.  This approach would have the advantage that we could give students useful feedback on their written work by using a visualiser to share  answers, helping children identify where their answers could be made more complete (or correct.)  This would be an assessment of learning  within the foundation subjects to be proud of.

Summative assessment

But do children still remember what they learnt  months – or even years – later?  We are going to do a scary experiment in July. We are going to do a super quiz, assessing knowledge from all the ‘big 4’ topics they have done this year.  We will reissue them with back catalogue of KO’s to take home to revise, whizz through previous KO’s in story time,  re-run a couple of previous mcq’s in the run up – presenting the super quiz as a fun challenge with prizes for the year group with the best average score in each of the 4 subjects.  My class teachers are predicting very low scores…2 out of 10 being one suggestion.  We shall see. If they are that low, then mmm…. perhaps they just won’t make it onto my transitional object  spreadsheet.   It will be fascinating to see how the children do.  If they really don’t remember that much longer term, then that’s another argument for doing daily  short mcq’s or drills during the unit .  I was talking to Daisy Christodoulou recently and she had the very sensible idea of  helping children embed key grammar and punctuation ideas by doing editing challenges using  short passages  drawn from the  humanities curriculum from the previous year.  By so doing, the knowledge floating semi-forgotten somewhere in the long-term memory is re-remembered, thus strengthening that memory’s retrieval strength.

When I introduced the KO idea, I suggested that during topic blocks for the  subjects we weren’t going to have KO’s for (computing, art, and DT) that they gave out a previous unit’s KO each week, so knowledge was revisited. For good reasons this fell by the wayside, but it is something  to think about for next year.  And that brings me nicely to…

Assessment in the other 6 subjects?

So  history, geography, RE and science are sorted then.  That still leaves French and computing, art, DT, music and PE to assess. I’m not even going to go there with PHSE surely we can just teach that and  leave it at that? At St Matthias, French is taught by a subject specialist and native French speaker. She is off to Norwich in July to learn from Barry Smith  how to teach French the Michalea way.   I’m hoping we can adapt his method for ks2 learners, including the use of KO’s.   Computing, art, DT, PE and music could have their own KO’s reinforcing key vocabulary but I’d rather we focused most of our attention on  the process leading to an end product and used responsive teaching based on in the moment verbal feedback as our primary assessment method. Teachers could   also plan one over-arching end of unit objective against which to assess the end product and decide  if this has been ‘met’, ‘exceeded’ or is, in the assessment vernacular   mot de jour  still ‘developing’.  Personally I  think this is  a bit daft, so maybe I should stick to my guns and say that our assessment policy for  these 5 subjects is purely formative.   The  downside of that approach is that then it is difficult to know if your students are achieving at an acceptable standard and the strengths and weaknesses of your provision How would a purely formative approach enable reporting on progress in DT to governors, for example?  (Remember that allowing  ‘leaders, governors and teachers to track progress’  in foundation subjects ‘ was the key issue in the Ofsted report at the start of this piece.)    Actually, I think  it is just not do-able for primary teachers to track (with or without out numbers) every subject in the national curriculum in a meaningful way that actually  improves learning for anyone and I’d hope that Sean Harford would change his mind on the appropriateness of Ofsted expecting this across the board.   Instead of  making up systems to pretend we are ‘tracking’ attainment in art etc., we should pour our efforts into making sure that the teaching  – usually by non specialists – of these foundation subjects is as good as it possibly can be.  Quality professional development and cross school moderation of  foundation subjects, especially these foundation subjects – now these are things worth pouring time and energy into.

 

KS2 maternity cover Sept 2017- July 2018

Salary:  MPS/UPS fixed term contract

Want a great year, teaching in a great school in a great location?

You will have to work hard here, but only on things that make a difference: we don’t do meaningless paperwork; we don’t grade lessons or monitor your planning.  Instead of marking we give feedback in lessons.  We are always trying to find smarter ways to do our work. We only recruit people who are passionate about making a difference to children’s lives; people who challenge themselves to keep on improving. This means our working relationships can be relatively relaxed and informal. People love working here; we are warm, welcoming, positive, supportive and forward looking.

You will be joining a 1 form entry Church of England school with an inclusive and multi-cultural ethos based in the vibrant Shoreditch area of Tower Hamlets. Our community includes pupils and staff from a range of different faiths as well as people with no faith – all are welcome. We work together to foster children who are compassionate, respectful, happy, tolerant, curious and collaborative as well as academically successful.

We are looking for a teacher who:

• Has a proven record of success as a class teacher and expertise in empowering children to make rapid progress.
• Demonstrates optimism about children and expect the highest possible standards
• Nurtures pupils’ emotional wellbeing

We offer you:

• Sensible and successful systems, based on research, with a commitment to reduce workload whenever possible
• A positive, warm and welcoming working environment
• Experienced, intelligent, lively colleagues
• Family-friendly working practices
• A fantastic location with great transport links

Closing date for applications: Friday 19^th May
Interviews: week commencing Monday 22^nd May

Visits to the school are strongly recommended and can be arranged via on 020 7739 8058 or by emailing Maureen Marlborough at admin@st-matthias.towerhamlets.sch.uk  This is also the address if you want an application pack.  We reserve the right to close the selection process early.

St Matthias School is committed to safeguarding all children. Successful candidates will require a DBS clearance and suitable references before commencing employment. We welcome applications from all section of the community, regardless of gender, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or age.

 

www.stmatthiasschool.org.uk

St Matthias School

Bacon Street

London

E2 6DY

020 7739 8058

There’s a lot of whinging about the financial situation. Come on people!  We need to embrace the austerity agenda. It’s the perfect opportunity to root out waste; cut the fat. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers knew how to ‘make do and mend’, so stop snivelling and start cutting. Look what I’ve saved!

Early intervention

Before: provide additional speech and language therapy as part of our early intervention offer.

Cost £14,5000[1] for a speech and language therapist one day a week.

Now: the nursery teaching assistant will run a group once a week.  This will leave the teacher with the rest of the class, so this can only run if a couple of children are off sick. Otherwise our ratios are wrong.   But our attendance isn’t exactly our strong point, so that should be fine.  If a child wets themselves or falls over and needs first aid – the TA’s a resourceful person, I’m sure she’ll be able to weave that into the speech and language group somehow. After all, using real life situations is good practice isn’t it.

Interventions in phonics, maths and writing

Before: provide TA led maths interventions with 3x 1 hour sessions for small groups in year 2 and yrs 4,5 and 6

Cost: £2,000

Now: provide children with 15 minutes maths catch up from the teacher during assembly twice a week. The idea that assemblies are the whole school coming together as a community is rather old fashioned and a little bit hippy dippy, ‘let’s hug a tree’, in my view.  The vicar will be fine holding the fort and I’ll even timetable a couple of TA’s on hand to eyeball the restless. And to mop up any vomit or other human spillages. Children eh! Dreadful tendency to leak at inconvenient times.

Before: Provide additional 4 staff to run daily phonics groups in addition to core staff for an hour each day. Provide high quality training and coaching for all staff delivering the programme.  Provide TA led additional daily phonics sessions for children in year 1 who are not on track to pass their phonics check.

Cost £15,000

Now: I hear mixed methods aren’t all that bad. (Just don’t tell @oldandrewuk[2])

Before: teacher led writing intervention for ks2 pupils 1 hour, once a week

Cost: £5,000

Now: buy some fancy pencils. Children make much faster progress when they have fancy pencils. I might even splash out on some gel pens if I can save a bit by turning down the heating a few more degrees. Children don’t feel the cold anyway do they. If I hear any complaints from staff, I’ll tell them to wear another jumper.

Pastoral and family support

Before: employ school based social worker for half a day a week. Cost £6,900

Now: pass the cost of early intervention onto social care; it’s their responsibility anyway. I know they moan that we’re clogging up their system, by calling their duty line and expecting help to be brought in, instead of providing it in house where apparently it is it is perceived as ‘less threatening’ and is therefore more effective. But these needy families need to man up. Especially the ones with single mothers.

Before: Employ a home: school liaison officer for 3 days a week to provide pastoral and family support and work with families where attendance is poor. Cost £18,000

Now: see previous answer re social care.  Try shouting at parents whose kids have bad attendance. I’m sure that will work. For really challenging families, offer them a transfer form. I hear St Bingo’s have plenty of spaces. Then there is always permanent exclusion. Under used, in my book.

Building cultural capital

Before: free breakfast club for disadvantaged children

Cost: £8,000

Now: hasn’t anyone heard of the obesity crisis? Seriously, the last thing kids need these days is free food.

Before: after school clubs for disadvantaged pupils, providing additional learning opportunities to those who have narrow life experiences

Cost: £10,000

Now: should we really be trying to make up for parental deficiencies?  I mean, I’m sure if we stop trying to be surrogate parents, that will be just the helpful nudge some parents need to take up the reins of their responsibilities.

Provide extracurricular enhancement through trips and residential experiences

Before: ensure all children build their cultural capital through visits to museums, galleries, theatres, concerts and have the opportunity to attend a residential trip

Cost: £6,000

Now: Actual visits are very stressful and time consuming. You can see most things anyway via Google and YouTube.  As for the residential trip – do a sleepover at school. I’m sure the staff will be really excited at the prospect of sleeping on the floor of the hall, along with their class after a stimulating day at the chalk face. So character building! Our children find the countryside a bit scary anyway – they feel so much safer here in the inner city. And who says we don’t care for the whole child!

So there you have it. I saved nearly £80,000 with a little bit of pruning.  Easy when you know how.

[1]  Just in case you hadn’t realised, this is a parody. All of the costings are made up, so please don’t put comments saying ‘well that’s expensive for a TA, or whatever.’ It’s bad enough having to do the sums to set a budget without doing more sums for a work of fiction.  And if you happen to work at St Matthias, this is not my actual plan.

[2] I did mention that this is a parody, didn’t I.