My wife has recently started a PGCE in Computer Science and this led to me thinking about my own experience as a trainee teacher almost 20 years ago. Over these two decades, I’ve learned a lot about what makes good teaching, as well as what doesn’t work. Countless mistakes made in the classroom have helped me to hone my practice just as much as the successes have driven my development. I would like to think that I’ve acquired what Aristotle termed phronesis – wisdom gained through direct experience. As my wife and I chatted in the kitchen about her teacher training, it sparked the idea for this article – a list of accrued wisdom that could be useful for a PGCE student beginning their training. Something that could help them save time, do things more effectively and help to ensure that they approach their job in a sustainable way.
Marking and assessment
I wish someone had told me that there are smarter ways to mark students’ work. I’m from the era where marking each piece of work in depth was considered good practice. When I say marking, I am referring to detailed written comments in every students’ book. The folly of this grew to even larger proportions as it was then considered good practice to double mark student work. This resulted in an almost open-ended written dialogue between teacher and student. Ah, the good old days! New teachers, especially those in the humanities where extended writing is routine, should understand there are a few smart marking/assessment tips they can use.
- Whole class feedback strategies. One example of this is to take a set of books, surmise the main errors/misconceptions and then reteach to close these knowledge gaps. Instead of individual comments in each students’ book, you have one central sheet where your observations of students’ work are captured. These can even be photocopied and stuck in students’ books.
- Target marking. Instead of writing out the same comment dozens of times, you can use short hand target codes for common errors. The following example can help to illustrate how this works in practice
- Class 9Sc2 have just completed their evaluations after conducting a science experiment to test whether a selection of items are acid, alkali or neutral. Their teacher collects their books to see how accurately students have written their evaluations. They find common errors such as: weak explanations of the scientific process, a lack of comments on what went wrong during the experiment and little reference to the data collected. Instead of writing out the same comments for 32 students, the teacher gives each of these errors a code e.g. T1, T2, T3, to represent the target focus. The following lesson, these codes, along with their descriptors are placed on the board in a slide. Students then copy out their target themselves.
What makes this example effective is that it forces the students to engage with the process as opposed to being passive recipients of feedback. When it comes to feedback, the maxim is that the recipient should work harder than the donor.
3. Take a snap! I came across this handy technique in Andy Tharby and Shaun Ellison’s ‘Making Every Lesson Count’. This form of smart assessment involves taking a picture of a student’s work and live marking it using a visualiser. Alternatively, you can display the picture on a projector if a visualiser is not available. Students can then self/peer assess based on how you have taught them to assess a piece of work. The marked piece of work can also be used as a benchmark or model, so that the rest of the class can go back and amend their work aiming to achieve the same level of excellence.
Organisation and Planning
Again, another common approach when I first started teaching was to make every resource from scratch. This included PowerPoint slides, worksheets and student guides. I can still remember sitting down for hours each Saturday, busily planning materials for the week ahead. This should not be the case. Our weekends should be reserved for friends, family and doing the things we love. Thankfully, most schools now have quality resources available so that teachers have something to work with. Yes, by all means adapt existing material for your class, but no teacher should be having to plan everything from scratch. If you find yourself in a department which does not have pre-existing material, sites like TES and publishers with quality textbooks are good places to go to reduce your planning workload.
There’s a caveat here. All teachers should learn to develop good resources. I am against outsourcing this level of thinking to AI. A teacher needs to develop their understanding of what makes a quality learning resource. Whilst AI can augment this, only once the teacher has developed a deep level of curriculum understanding, there’s no shortcut to acquiring an eye for quality, I’m afraid. There’s a satisfaction that ensues when you develop a quality resource. This feeling is compounded when you are able to share it with your colleagues and make a meaningful contribution to your department.
Learning to move on from a bad lesson
When a class erupts into noise and chaos, it’s easy to attribute this to your own lack of competence. Of course, poor planning and preparation, negligence and a lack of what is commonly called ‘with it-ness’ can all create the conditions for poor behaviour. However, sometimes you can lose control of a class through no fault of your own. Even with 20 years’ experience, this sometimes happens to me for reasons outside of my control. There are so many external variables that can affect students’ behaviour: time of day, where you are in the school term, or an incident that occurred between pupils last lesson or during break. You have zero control over these things. Drop your pride and accept that there’s only so much you can control. After a bad lesson, by all means reflect, but then move on!
Understanding a little bit about cognitive science
Do you know the difference between working memory and long term memory? Are you familiar with cognitive load theory? Or, would you be able to articulate how best to get students to learn essential knowledge that they can retrieve at will? Don’t worry if the answer to these questions is no. As a PGCE student, I would not have been able to answer these questions on cognitive science. The process of memory was understood in a binary context; you either have a good one or you don’t. Things such as cognitive load, working memory and retrieval were not part of our everyday lexicon in the world of teaching. The leading educational think tank, EEF suggests “There is value in teachers having working knowledge of cognitive science principles”. I agree with this. Knowing that there is broadly a level playing field when it comes to our capacity for learning should remind us that every child can learn what is required of them. I am under no illusion that class, neurodiversity, culture, access, locality, and trauma (to name a few) can have a significant impact on an individual’s brain, and consequently their capacity for learning. However, overall we are largely hardwired with a similar potential. A teacher possessing this understanding can begin to have high expectations for all students and possess the belief that all learners can make good progress. I understand that this is somewhat an oversimplification, as learning and learners’ lives are incredibly complex, but it at least allows us to work from a positive set of beliefs about learners.
Conclusion
One of the key takeaways from this blog should be sustainability – ensuring that workloads are kept manageable and burnout and overwhelm are avoided. I wish someone had told me some of these things early on. Recent DfE figures show that recruitment targets for both primary and secondary ITT entrants were met. This is genuinely good news for the profession. The key thing to focus on now is retention of good teachers.