I hope you enjoy this week’s takeaways!
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Teachers gather info by questioning or observation, prompted by @Doug_Lemov
When I was preparing for my podcast discussion with Doug Lemov, I was trying to build a mental model of some of the key ideas shared within his book. In the first section, Doug wrote the following, ‘There are two ways that teachers seek to gather data: via questioning and via observation. Chapter One discusses the tools necessary to do these efficiently and well.’
This was a great idea, I thought, and I tried to link each of the techniques described in Chapter 1 to these two ideas. Here’s what I came up with:
I wrote about reject self-report back in TOT092. Here’s a little about the idea of Tracking not watching.
Technique 4: Tracking, not watching
Summary: Be intentional about how you scan your classroom. Decide specifically what you're looking for and remain disciplined about it in the face of distractions.
In TLAC 3.0 this will be called, Active observation.
The key idea here is that a teacher walking around the classroom should be seen as a method of collecting objective data. This requires having clarity about what you’re looking for. Related to this, Doug emphasised the impossibility of taking, ‘mental notes’ whilst going around the classroom (especially for early-career teachers), and stressed the importance of being clear about what you’re hunting for, then making notes about which student responses, or types of responses, you want to comment upon or refer to when you bring it back to whole-class teaching. Tracking = writing it down.
I’ll likely touch on some of the others in more detail in later posts too. But for now, I thought that some may find this an interesting way to tie together some of the ideas in chapter 1 of TLaC.
When we talk about instructional coaching, what do we mean? via @Josh_CPD
Back in TOT062 I shared Sam Sim’s article, Four reasons instructional coaching is currently the best-evidenced form of CPD (if going to this post, you need to scroll down the page a bit to get to this particular article). But when we say ‘instructional coaching’, what do we actually mean?
In this vein, there’s been a bit of a discussion on Twitter recently about instructional coaching, and whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be. Importantly, as with any debate, it’s valuable to spend some time actually making sure that we’re all talking about the same thing!
This article by Josh Goodrich is an excellent place to start! It’s also the first of a series of posts by Josh on this topic. I’m eagerly awaiting installment no. 2!
Edit: For an excellent guide covering what Instructional Coaching is, a summary of the research evidence for Instructional Coaching, guidance for how to set up coaching in a school, advice on how to select and train great coaches, and more, check out the Steplab Beginner's Guide to Instructional Coaching.
How to remember anything forever, via @daisychristo
Those who have spent time on this blog in the past will know that I’m a big fan of spaced repetition software and related approaches to learning.
If you’re looking for a good overview of what spaced repetition is all about, and how it can be used to enhance memories for students and teachers alike, this presentation by Daisy Christodoulou is an excellent place to start.
Here were my two main takeaways:
It's not about using tech to outsource long term memory, it's about using it to improve long term memory.
Tooth brushing analogy: If you want to stop tooth decay, you need to develop an effective way of brushing them (elaborative encoding), an you need to turn that into a habit and do it regularly (spaced repetition)
5 minute lesson plan, via with @TeacherToolkit, ht to @RethinkingJames
James Mannion recently interviewed the man behind the teacher toolkit, Ross McGill, on the Rethinking Education podcast.
One of the things they mentioned in their discussion, which I was surprised to not have come across (or remembered) before, was the five minute lesson plan. The goal of this planning template is to streamline lesson planning and reduce teacher workload without compromising the quality of teaching and learning.
Creative writing: How to create compelling characters, via @kiraannepelican
In this article, Kira-Anne suggests that authors, young and old alike, can look to psychology for hints on how to create compelling characters. More specifically, they can consider the Big 5 personality traits model to create characters with depth!
Math teaching resource: Transition to Algebra, via @mpershan
You’ll be hearing more from Michael Pershan and I soon, but, in the meantime, here’s one of the resources recommended in his recent book, Teaching Math With Examples that I took a deep dive into this week and absolutely loved.
The resource is Transition to Algebra, and you can find it here.
The ‘Ebonics’ controversy, via @yourewrongabout
Ebonics: A term proposed in the 1970s to refer to the language/dialect of African American people (and to acknowledge the impact of slavery on this language). Today, the term African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is more widely used.
This You’re Wrong About podcast episode tracks the ‘Ebonics controversy’ in the US in the 1990s, which involved debate around the way in which Ebonics would be regarded in US education.
I really enjoyed this podcast this week. My main takeaways from it were:
- It demonstrates the value of instructional programs that honour and utilise the linguistic backgrounds of students as a basis of instruction
- It highlighted a portion of the long history of the suppression of these such programs, and the extent to which some people and organisations will go to in order to try to stop them
- Words like ‘be’ (‘He be early’) in Ebonics don’t mean what I thought they did, and they have really cool meanings that have no standard English equivalent! (this bit was super interesting, and fun)
Well worth a listen!