Lots of great takeaways this week. From practical classroom strategies, to some of my own musings on teaching dispositions, to a new and fun podcast. All below.

Enjoy 🙂

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A trad and a prog walk into a butcher’s shop…, via @adamboxer1 and @RethinkingJames

This week I absolutely LOVED listening to Adam Boxer and James Mannion. A deep discussion between two educators who would frequently be classified as traditional and progressive respectively, but in which the two actually spend the time to work out what they truly agree, and disagree on, rather than arguing against a caricature of each other.

These are the kinds of conversations we should be having more of in education!

For a bunch of handy teaching techniques, insight, and to understand the title of this takeaway (what’s it all got to do with meat?) listen here.

Frontloading: How to stop your students from packing up whilst you’re giving instructions at the end of the lesson, via @adamboxer1

Found this great post through the podcast mentioned above. Here are some great takeaways, but it’s worth reading in its entirety here!

Takeaways:

“What is the word equation for photosynthesis? Please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me”

On the face of it, this is a good instruction. The question is clean and clear and the MOP [Means of Participation] is established in terms of how the students will write and present their answer. But – and this is my experience, both first-hand and observed – it doesn’t work, and you still end up with students raising their boards before you have asked them. I think the reason for this is pretty simple: the second you ask them the question, they start writing down their answer (or at least thinking about it) and they are no longer listening to you. It’s not that they are being defiant or messing around, they just didn’t take in the instruction. And again, it’s not because the instruction isn’t clear, it’s not a property of the instruction itself – it’s a property of its placement; where it sits in the sentence. Try this:

“Ok in a second I’m going to ask a question, please write your answer on your mini-whiteboard and hold it face down until I ask you to show me. What is the word equation for photosynthesis?”

…

“Ok, I’m going to ask a question and you are going to one [hold up a finger] write your answer on a mini whiteboard [hold up two fingers] two keep it face down and [hold up three fingers] three show me only when I say. Write down [one finger], face down [two fingers], show me [three fingers.] Ok who can say the instruction back to me… David?… Excellent. Write down, face down, show me [use the fingers again.] What is the word equation for photosynthesis?”

Focused Feedback: Making feedback more effective, via @hfletcherwood

In my recent podcast with Michael Pershan, Michael mentioned a great piece of advice that Harry Fletcher-Wood once gave him: give feedback that focuses on one main thing!

Coincidentally, in the same week that I released this podcast with Michael, Harry released a fantastic blog post on this exact topic! (full post here)

Some of my takeaways from Harry’s post…

Focused feedback is great because it reduces cognitive load for students, reduces workload for teachers, and promotes behaviour change, which is in line with Wiliam’s suggestions that feedback should improve the learner, not the task!

Focused feedback means that, Feedback should focus on a single, meaningful goal, and encourage students to act on it immediately.

The formula for focused feedback is:

1. Pick the most important thing students can improve.
2. Give an immediate task that helps them act on the goal.
3. Show how this improvement applies to future tasks.

I love this idea, hoping Harry posts more ideas about what this could look like in the classroom in future.

Why deliberate practice is crucial in CPD, via @Josh_CPD

This week Josh Goodrich posted an excellent thread on why it’s important for teachers to not just learn new info during professional development, but also practice it. Here are a few key excerpts (full thread here)

4. Conscious thought is slow and effortful; automatised action is fast and efficient. When these generate conflicting outcomes (I am in the habit of doing X, but I’ve learnt that Y is a better action), the automatic behaviour will win (Feldon, 2007).

Even if they learn something new and have initial success, high load situations can cause teachers to backslide to more long-established habits.

The main point that I took from this thread was that changing teaching is, in most cases, changing habits. And changing habits requires time and application of the new routine.

7. Change requires teachers to incorporate new ideas into stable systems of practice that are ‘already satisfactory and may also be largely habitual.’ Knowing about change isn’t enough: teachers must form habits around the change. (Kennedy, 2016)

How does interleaving work?

A possible explanation for why interleaving (High Contextual Interference) works to improve retention.

Possible explanations for the beneficial effects of HCI are that the different versions of a task reside together in working memory and can be compared and contrasted to each other to yield more elaborate representations in memory (Shea & Zimny, 1983)

As referenced in Van Merrienboer, J. J., Kester, L., & Paas, F. (2006). Teaching complex rather than simple tasks: Balancing intrinsic and germane load to enhance transfer of learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(3), 343–352. (in papers)

New post: Dispositions – What the heck are they, and how do we teach them? Via me!

This week I released a new post that summarises what I feel are some insights gained from thinking about learning dispositions recently. You may enjoy checking it out here.

A fun podcast: Cautionary Tales, via @TimHarford

In the Cautionary Tales podcast, Tim Hartford tells true stories from history, connects them to psychology, and distills the key ideas into life lessons. It’s awesome! Check it out wherever you get your podcasts by searching for, ‘Cautionary Tales’ 🙂