Way back in June 2018 our Science department attempted to set out what we wanted our
curriculum to be like, after our initial interleaving of the concepts. Since
then we have been working towards this through our Wednesday CPD time,
curriculum development tasks and through the idea of the weeks. Each part of
our wish list depends upon the design of the curriculum, our choice of pedagogy
and our skill as teachers to deliver it.
Reading this list again the prominence of Literacy,
Assessment and Memory in what we value is
very clear.
To ensure
constructive alignment every SOW has
●
Learning Intention sheet for student books
●
Key ideas/ Misconceptions clearly identified for
teachers
●
Pre- quizzes aligned to learning intentions
●
Been double checked against the syllabus
To ensure quality two way
feedback every SOW has
●
A prequiz using an assessment grid
●
Marking tokens for each key ideas.
● Tasks that have inbuilt self
reflection and assessments
● Useful demonstrate tasks for
quick teacher feedback. (eg Hinge questions)
●
End of topic tests and/or is part of a summative test
●
Tasks to develop exam technique
To ensure
development of student skills and knowledge (including literacy)
●
Regular opportunities to write in an extended way-with
feedback
●
Read complex academic texts to develop student scientific
vocabulary.
●
Tasks that develop vocabulary.
●
Tasks to practice scientific skills- with feedback
●
Tasks and marking tokens that focus on Required
Practicals and associated language and skills.
●
Strategic homework
To ensure long term retention
●
Multiple exposure planned and made clear to teachers
●
SOWS are
interleaved and spaced - 5 years.✓
● Tasks to activate prior knowledge
● Use of low stakes testing eg last
year, last topic, last week,last lesson
●
Planned spaces between teaching and marking tokens.
●
Knowledge organiser for each topic
●
Strategic homework
To ensure clarity of
teaching
●
Slides that structure and augment explanations- not
necessarily to scaffold a lesson.
●
Clear useful diagrams, analogies, images
To ensure engagement
●
Task that set context and provide interesting hooks
●
Tasks develop student agency
Literacy
“Reading, writing, speaking and
listening, are at the heart of every subject in secondary school. Focusing time
and resources on improving reading and writing skills will have positive
knock-on effects elsewhere, whether that’s being able to break down scientific
vocabulary or structure a history essay.”
It
recommends the
● Prioritising
of subject-specific literacy skills across the curriculum.
●
Teaching
vocabulary to support pupils’ development of academic language.
●
Developing
students’ ability to read and access sophisticated texts
So, it is with this in mind that we have developed our
Literacy strand to our new Literacy, Assessment and Memory bundles (LAMB’s).
This has been a major focus for the idea of the week since it began, and so we
have many simple and effective strategies to hand. Many are summarised here: A summary of Literacy strategies
Assessment.
Macfarlane Dick and Nichol recommend that good feedback practice:
1. helps clarify what good performance is (goals, criteria,
expected standards);
2. facilitates the development of self-assessment
(reflection) in learning;
3. delivers high quality information to students about their
learning;
4. encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning;
5. encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem;
6. provides opportunities to close the gap between current
and desired performance
Providing effective feedback is a complex business, but two
general principles seem to apply fairly consistently.
- As students approach
mastery a delay in feedback can be beneficial, for example after an exam
or marking token .
- Immediate feedback is beneficial
when students are in the early stages of developing their understanding.
○
Task level feedback is only useful here
○
We must balance giving feedback and teaching new ideas
as dealing with feedback uses a lot of working memory.
So, we must provide focussed opportunities to check student
understanding that are quick and to the point but still aiming to meet all the
criteria set out by Macfarlane- Dick and Nichol. It is especially important
that the dialogue between teacher and student dialogue, as in the two way
feedback on our wishlist. Ultimately,this will increase the amount of quality
teacher feedback in books but reduce the burden of marking. This again has been
a recurring theme in the ideas of the week. At the heart of these strategies is
the idea of a hinge activity to reveal the student
current understanding quickly and accurately.
Memory.
Memory.
The Memory strand, as the others has been a major theme for
idea of the week. A summary of the strategies can be read here The strategies include those that
support the limitations of working memory and strategies that seek to encourage
long term retention of knowledge.
Our pre-quizzes work on the The Pretesting Effect which paints a somewhat counterintuitive view
of learning and testing
“In terms of long-term
learning, however, unsuccessful tests fall into the same category as a number
of other effective learning phenomena - providing challenges for learners leads
to low initial test performance, thereby alienating learners and educators,
while simultaneously enhancing long-term learning.”
To supplement this retrieval practice is a way of supporting
the retrieval strength of learned concepts. The students in essence practice
how to remember. We have been long time fans of the expanding retrieval schedule and many of us have
selected to measure its impact for the Great Teaching Groups. As Lee Croucher
astutely pointed out this week, the design of these is somewhat responsive to
how well students have performed in previous lessons, and this makes it more
difficult to pre plan this kind of task. What we can prepare are question banks
that will provide regular practice with the big, frequent and important ideas
within them.
Conclusion.
A key strategy in learning is the
idea of multiple exposures to the idea being learned Nuthall
said
” Provided a student is able to piece together, in working memory, the equivalent of three complete definitions or descriptions of a concept, that new concept will be constructed as part of the students long term memory”
His
research primarily suggests some useful planning suggestions. So that for
learning to take place, students must:
interact with a full explanation of concept at least once.
interact with the information on at least four separate occasions
This makes the tasks in the LAMB’s so very
useful, providing the opportunities to revisit the concepts over and over again
in differing ways so that learning has the best chance to happen. Teaching followed by a literacy strategy, followed by a memory task followed by a focused assessment makes this a realistic aim.
Strategy is one thing and so it supporting teachers to feel equipped to use new them So the ideas included in LAMB’s have been (and will be) supported by the idea of the weeks to help us deliver the great curriculum our students deserve. Each
task, in essence, is quite small, and will not take long to plan. So relatively quickly it should be easy to build up a library of useful tasks- focused on key ideas and misconceptions. Imagine a department of 10 (pretty easy for a Science, Maths or English department) contributed one task per week over the course of a year
we could have around 380 tasks to support the development of our students'
scientific literacy and supporting their
learning through quick and effective assessment and opportunity to transfer
knowledge to their long term memory. It certainly is a worthy aim.
The first two LAMB's are available here.
The first two LAMB's are available here.
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