Nine months ago I posted a blog which was the translation of a page of a Japanese text book (here and here). Mary Whitehouse saw it and introduced me to Shinjiro Ogawa – a Japanese science teacher on secondment to Italy. We met at the ASE conference. Shinjiro introduced me to several Japanese colleagues, all of who are working on fascinating projects.

Shinjiro has been very generous sharing Japanese resources – here is a year 6 activity on electromagnets (from: http://happylilac.net ‘Chibi-Musu-Drill’)

You could use Google Translate and a bit of editing to read this, but I’ve done the first page for you (see below)

I hope you enjoy it!

@benrogersedu

Continue reading “A Japanese Year 6 Electromagnet Worksheet” →

Two weeks ago I wrote a short blog about how I wanted to structure my trust’s initial teacher programme (here).

I asked for feedback and advice and I got it (thank you). The principal advice was that we’d focussed heavily on skills and strategies without looking at the theory. I think teaching strategies are very important – the cognitive load of the classroom is enormous: if a novice teacher can focus on practising specific proven strategies, she will be able to process more information in the classroom and learn to be a better teacher faster (I’ve written about this here).

But understanding learning is important too – and I don’t think we’ve neglected it. In fact, I’m proud of what we’ve done.

So I thought I’d share what we’ve learnt (through worked examples, completion problems, goal free activities, retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaving, concrete examples, etc.).

The title of this post reflects the view that ITE in England is like the Wild West. There are great opportunities, but also great risks. I am sharing, because I like transparency; I’m looking for feedback and perhaps, if you like what we do, you’l recommend someone to train with us.

Continue reading “Teacher Training: “The Dodge City of the Education World” (Levine)” →

We teach Key Stage 2 children (7-11 year olds) how to solve interesting and sophisticated maths problems (see here). Many children are comfortable using the Singapore style bar-model methods to support mathematical problem solving.

But the only physics problems we set pupils at primary are data-handling types (typically bar charts).

I have written previously about cognitive load theory and problem solving (here and here). But to teach problem solving, you need problems. Continue reading “Physics Problems for Primary Pupils” →

In July last year, the principals of Paradigm Trust gave me a task: redesign Initial Teacher Training from the ground up.

The brief was to develop skillful, knowledgeable, thoughtful  teachers for our pupils. I could use the knowledge and skills within the Trust and bring in expertise where we have gaps.

We are lucky to have a partnership with the University of East London, who support us by evaluating our programme and moderating our judgements so that we know we are fulfilling our legal obligations and not, in our enthusiasm, missing anything important.

So what does the programme look like?

Continue reading “What if you could develop Initial Teacher Training (ITT) in any way you wanted?” →

My maths trainees have been teaching problem solving. These are the rules we have developed:

Rule #1: Don’t give your students problems that you haven’t taught them how to solve.

The pupils who solve the problem won’t have learnt much from it (see here). The pupils who don’t solve it have learnt nothing. Continue reading “Seven Rules for Teaching Problem Solving in Maths.” →

My trainee maths teachers love setting students challenging, interesting problems. I see students scribbling away trying to be first to solve it, or staring at the table, or scribbling away pretending not to stare at the table.

The feeling that the trainees (and I) get when the first couple of students solve it is great. That’s the seduction, but it’s important to take a wider view.

First, the students who solve it may benefit. I am uncertain. Cognitive Load Theory shows that working with a high cognitive load inhibits learning. Continue reading “Seductive Problems” →

Retrieval practice is in the air. The latest blog by Alex Laney on the Teach Like a Champion blog (here) is very useful.

We’ve been developing retrieval practice DoNows with the trainee teachers at Paradigm Trust, but we’re also keen on practising sentence types. Hochman and Wexler’s The Writing Revolution is full of great sentence practice activities. We’re using: ButBecauseSo and Expand-a-Sentence, both of which work well with factual knowledge recall.

ButBecauseSo:

This activity not only uses retrieval practice, but elaboration as well. Your students are taking a single idea and strengthening its links to other ideas, developing the relationships between them.

• Squealer called a meeting, but…
• Squealer called a meeting, because…
• Squealer called a meeting, so…

• Magnetic north poles repel, but…
• Magnetic north poles repel, because…
• Magnetic north poles repel, so…

• 2 is the only even prime number, but…
• 2 is the only even prime, because…
• 2 is the only even prime number, so…

TopTip: always try these out before you give them to students in case they aren’t possible (I struggled with “2 is the only even prime number, but… ) – if you can’t do it, your students probably can’t either.

Expand-a-Sentence:

Give your students a very simple sentence. E.g. “Magnesium is an element,” or “The Weimar Republic was unsuccessful.”

The retrieval practice comes in the next stage. Students have to give short answers to as many of the following as possible:

• Who __________
• What _________
• Where _________
• When _________
• Why _________
• How _________

The final step is to expand the original sentence. E.g.

In practice, the DoNow looks like this:

So, use your DoNows for retrieval practice, but think about the sentences too.

@benrogersedu

“She is very confident in her decision, but subjective confidence is a poor index of accuracy of a judgement.”

Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow p.244.

I have been re-reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow because I am interested in expertise – specifically, expertise in the classroom.

In chapter x, Kahneman writes about the differences between experts and novices, and whether intuition can be developed. I want to know whether I can trust my intuition about whether students are learning. Kahneman says I probably can’t, unless I’ve had clear, quick and accurate feedback.

Like most of us, I use proxies to tell in the classroom who is getting it and who isn’t: nodding, smiles, on-taskness. And then I take in the books….

According to Kahneman, experts in any field are generally overconfident in their judgements. Expert teachers generally over-estimate the amount their students are learning. This problem is worst for novice teachers. If they rely on their intuition about whether their students are learning, they can be badly misled.

“Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received from his judgements?”

Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow p.244.

Novice teachers need quick, clear and accurate feedback. Feedback from mentors or evidence in books is too late. They need feedback on learning immediately to tell whether their class is getting-it.

But they also need to develop their intuition about long-term retention. They need feedback the next lesson and feedback a month later.

In Teach Like A Champion 2.0, Doug Lemov describes a strategy called the “Exit-Ticket”. We call it a check-out or a plenary. It is common-place. A well designed check-out gives the teacher feedback on the lesson faster than any mentor. By well designed, I mean:

• It focusses on assessing the most important learning from the lesson.
• It allows students to demonstrate whether they have understood or not.
• It allows you to quickly walk round the class and see who can do it and who can’t.

But don’t forget about forgetting. Can you say it was an effective lesson if your students have forgotten it by the next lesson? How can find out how much has been remembered?

The check-in checks the same learning as the check-out. It may even be the same task. We do the check-in as part of the starter activity of the lesson. The teacher can quickly and clearly see whether the previous lesson was as effective as she thought.

But remembering and forgetting is a long, slow process, so you need a check-up.  A check-up takes place weeks and months later. It assesses again whether the learning you thought happened is still there.

All of this assessing gives excellent feedback to the novice teacher, allowing her to develop more accurate intuition. Luckily it is good for the learner too: retrieval practice, spaced practice, and if you add together various check-ins and check-ups, you have interleaving too.

But for trainee teachers, it’s the feedback that’s most important. Your intuition is built on fast, clear and accurate feedback – the fastest way to become an expert.

Over the past year and a half I have been writing a handbook for novice physics teachers. The book is about using cognitive science to help novice physicists into experts. In it I wrote the line:

A physicist is the sum of the problems she can solve.

Now my mind has turned to training teachers, I realise that a teacher too is the sum of the problems she can solve. Teaching is about solving problems: how to explain something quickly and clearly; how to assess it; how to break down sequence the ideas; how to get students into the class quickly; how to manage a Q&A…. The list is very long.

An expert teacher knows how to solve thousands of problems, some outside the classroom, but many of them live, in front of demanding students.

In my physics book, I used Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) to help understand how we learn to solve problems. One of the key findings of CLT is that we learn how to solve problems best when the cognitive load is low. That means, distractions should be kept to a minimum. The classroom is a terrible place to learn to teach.

At Paradigm Trust, we are addressing this problem by rehearsing solutions to classroom problems outside of the classroom. We are using Paul Bambrick’s Get Better Faster programme alongside Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 strategies. When these strategies become automatic, the cognitive load of the classroom is reduced, meaning teachers are able to learn to solve new problems faster.

The next blog discusses automaticity and Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion strategies. 

1. I have allowed for everything else that makes a teacher by adding a correction factor ‘X’. I am aware of how wrong-headed this is.