I was honoured to present during session one of @Claire_Hill_ and @WaldenKent's superbly organised ResearchED - Kent. Even more thrillingly, despite being scheduled against Edu-thinker heavyweights, some people came to my talk! If you're one of them - thank you. If you'd like to chat more, then do get in touch.
I attended four other sessions today. Here are my 10 lightbulbs, or key take-aways.
Session 2 - Testing Times - @jo_facer
Lightbulb 1: Most assessments that are designed, in schools, by HoDs or teachers can only tell you this: how well are children in your school doing in comparison to other children in your school. That's it! Therefore let's be wary of the amount of time and energy that can be sunk into them.
Lightbulb 2: If you need to convince your governors (or other stakeholders, perhaps including SLT) that we need to ditch things such as target grades and predicted grades, then send them blogs by @profbeckyallen and also Making Data Work, a workload advisory report.
Session 3 - Genre Overload - @teach_well (Tarjinder Wilkinson)
Lightbulb 3: In our primary writing curricula (often still very influenced by the National Literary Strategy) we cover way too many different genres of writing. This has a few major problems:
Pupils never master any genre (or the basics of writing for that matter)
They get distracted (away from the basics of writing) by trying to produce full texts that focus too much on lay-out/feature, not to mention the cognitive overload that happens when they try to operate at all these levels.
It threatens genres with being "disposable"- what's the point of really trying to master mystery writing if you only ever do it once in Year 3?
Lightbulb 4: If we strip the breadth of genres right back, all of a sudden we can meaningfully have single scaffolds and sets of success criteria that are the SAME from Year 1 - Year 6. Both simply decrease in detail as pupils secure the schemas (in their long term memory) for these genres.
Light Bulb 5: A very simple but effective writing curriculum (linked to The Writing Revolution) would be to focus purely on construction at a sentence level in Year 1 and 2. Then in Year 3 and 4, they focus on the discipline of creating a coherent paragraph. Subsequently in Year 5-6, with the two prior skills secured, you move on to creation of whole texts.
Session 4 - Assessment Literacy - @NgeeOg (Dr Ngozi Oguledo)
Lightbulb 6: For teachers to become truly literate in assessment we must accept that it is NOT an ITT issue, but that we need to be involved in an ongoing, active process of engagement with assessment CPD, departmental discussions about assessment, collaborative design and moderation of assessment. This challenged my current position that I'm doing the other teachers in my school a favour (with regards to their workload) by designing all the English assessments and markschemes...
The definition shared by Ngozi is worth reading in it's entirety:
Lightbulb 7: One of the reasons that we need to engage in dialogue about assessment is exactly because teachers hold different conceptions about assessment, particularly the purpose of it. I thought this continuum was really useful:
Session 5: Why is Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction Paper So Good - @teacherhead (Tom Sherrington)
I've listened to Tom on numerous occasions and I'm delivering training based on Rosenshine at my school, so I thought: it can't hurt to hear Tom's take on it! As always, Tom provides an eloquent and humorous dissection of so many of our common teaching mistakes.
Lightbulb 8: The abseiling analogy. If you were teaching a group of people to abseil, you would never be so reckless to assume that just because a couple of them could tell you how to do it, that represented a secure position for everyone. You would never assume that because someone could articulate one part of the process, that they were secure with the whole process. We make these sorts of mistakes all the time when we're "checking for understanding."
Lightbulb 9: We need to be much more exacting about what we want pupils to DO in order to genuinely check this understanding. Often we set up, or accept, vague sort of tasks and answers. We're happy with "Most of you are going to learn some of this." If instead, we set the standard of "All of you are going to learn all of this" the commitment that will be requried from our planning and their execution is so much greater. One of Tom's examples was: you're delivering "Trial by Ordeal" (from the History Curriculum). You watch a video (great) and ask pupils to "make notes." Inevitably, the quality of these notes will be hugely variable. Instead, Tom suggested that you specify what you want them to take notes about, with the template below, and perhaps get them to compare it afterwards to a version you have pre-populated.
Lightbulb 10: We need to get used to pupils talking simultaneously in the classroom, as this how we can get in lots and lots of rehearsal and practice. This is a real challenge for me and my context.
A great day!