Learning focused student book reviews.

With the announcement by Ofsted that their focus on reviewing curriculum through student books, I thought it would be useful for me to share what a learning driven book review should contain. I wrote this along time a go , as an attempt to move the focus away from "book scrutiny" and a genuine attempt at prioritising what we know about structuring learning through lesson design and the curriculum. There will undoubtedly be something missing from this list but I think the following will reveal to us elements of lesson design, and the sequencing of teaching that can lead to learning. The list hopefully begins to ask the question "Does the curriculum serve the learning of my students?"

In no particular order the list is as follows:

• Constructive alignment of:
• intentions, teaching, assessment and feedback.
• Engagement in content over tasks.
• Activation of the correct prior knowledge.
• Multiple exposures to the same idea ( 3 or 4)
• spaced with time.
• interleaved with other content
• involves practice with content, especially the role low stakes testing can play.
• Does feedback develop self regulation? eg Use of Checklists, exemplars, co-constructed success criteria.
• Big ideas are broken down into smaller ideas and then built back up.
• Students have opportunities to think and struggle with content, i.e enter “the pit”
• Avoidance of relying solely upon scaffolded performance.
• Tasks that reduce means end thinking.
• Timing is considered for use of scaffolds. eg after an initial struggle.
• What assessment assess performance ( short term recall and understanding) or learning ( long term retention and application?)
• When does assessment of learning occur?
• Use of pre and post tests.
• is testing linked to learning intentions or grades?
• Does the feedback help student interact purposefully with the content.
• Is there an over reliance upon means end feedback, task level feedback.
• Is there sufficient content feedback.
• Domain thinking such as writing with genre.
• Opportunities to write applying knowledge of the subject in a formal way?
• clear literacy feedback upon developing this skill?
• Is academic language at the heart of learning? Eg science writing in the third person.

Since writing this I have developed what I hope is a self reflective activity for teachers to undertake a book review of their own. It is mainly focused around feedback, but where it has been planned as well as some of the elements from above.

What type of marking is present in this book?

There are many ways to provide feedback to students that can have a positive effect upon student learning. However the general rule is that content feedback is most effective.

“Regulate the learning rather than the activity. “ Dylan William.

1. Feedback about the task- how well was it done? What factual knowledge do they have? What conceptual understandings do they have? Advice and guidance may seek to identify what to do next. Eg.  Give an example here.
2. Feedback about the Process- how well have they thought about the task? What procedural knowledge do they have? Advice seeks to help the students think through the task. Eg. Start by showing your working out, before substituting the data in. or these sequence to help students work how to tell which organelles are nucleuses and which are chloroplasts: How many nucleuses does the plant cell have?____ Do plant cells have more than one chloroplast? ____ .How can you use this to remember how to label THE nucleus and the chloroplasts” (Process feedback)
3. Feedback about Self regulation based upon how well have they directed their activity and thinking and actions? What metacognitive knowledge have they employed?What might be a good strategy for learning how to remember labelling diagrams? Might covering them and trying to draw them from memory then checking how accurate you’ve been  help? ( Self regulation- providing a rehearsal strategy)
4. Feedback about based upon personal evaluation.Seeks to spot attitude, effort and motivation problems. Eg Poor effort. Advice and guidance is intended to motivate or correct poor learning attitudes.  This can often be counterproductive.
5. Content feedback seeks to clarify student thinking, provides the information that students may not have been holding in their working memory while producing the work or answer. Advice and guidance goes beyond the current task, and are often simple re-explanation. You have wrongly labelled the Nucleus as a chloroplast ( Task feedback based on content knowledge) In which does the force of weight act?  
6. Feedback about the quality of  student work attends both accuracy of the ideas within the work and then any notion of quality that your subject or schooling values. For example add units., spelling and grammar corrections
7. Summative assessment feedback that indicates current level of performance. This feedback intends to inform the student of their current level of performance through exam grades, percentage scores; it should tell student if they are on-track or if they are heading in the right direction.

Task A: Look through your book and tally each bit of feedback provided in these categories.

Task	Process	Self regulation	Personal	Content	Quality	Performance

Task B: Now tally up the ratio of teacher comments to student responses.

Total number of comments	Number of teacher comments where response is expected	Number of student responses

Learning is most successful when:

Task C : Ideas are built upon, and revisited over time. For ideas to be learned they should be revisited 3 or four times. Is there an example in your book that shows this? Photocopy or photograph this sequence and annotate where the ideas are established.

Task D: When students receive high quality content focused feedback. Is there an example in your book to show this?   Photocopy or photograph how this was scaffolded and annotate why the student response was successful

Task E: Teachers use student learning ( and errors) as a feedback and change the teaching as a result of it.

1. Is there an example of student work being used diagnostically so that a change in teaching sequence, strategy or emphasis occurred? Photocopy or photograph how this was scaffolded and annotate why the student response was successful
2. Is there an example of a rubric or pre-planned marking code to target key knowledge?Photocopy or photograph how this was scaffolded and annotate why the student response was successful
3. Is there an example of students have redrafted work to improve its quality?Photocopy or photograph how this was scaffolded and annotate why the student response was successful

Task F: Is there an example where you feel the work has been overly scaffolded and students may have missed an opportunity to struggle and think about the content? Photocopy or photograph this task and annotate why this content may have been better served being less a structured performance.

Task G: Learning is considered long term retention and application of knowledge  while performance is more short term and completed with scaffolding and classroom prompts to hand or in near memory.

1. Is there an example of assessment of learning?
2. and example of  assessment of performance?

What should school "experiences" be like?

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. CS Lewis.

A study of formative experiences in medical school is a revealing insight to what makes a good educational experience, after all it is good enough to prepare those in whom we trust our lives. As part of the curriculum students should be taught and have a wide range of rich formative experiences. So what might they need to be like?

The conclusions drawn from this study resonated with me and have been summarised as 

" Specific formative experiences have especially strong impacts on medical students. Whereas the intrinsic value of such experiences should continue to drive educational design, increased awareness of the diversity and range of formative experiences will prepare educators to more effectively guide positive emotional development, enhancing personal and professional growth during medical school." and that " emotional development is an important part of nascent professional competence."

I have paraphrased the outcomes of the most important experiences and added my own annotations to make a link to why this is relevant to schooling.  These are the top ten scoring “experiences” from the research, they are more or less in order, although I have grouped similar ideas together.

Experience	What might this mean for schooling?
Meeting a truly exceptional role model.	Where in your teaching do you get to show your subject based knowledge? Remember that  your teaching is a demonstration of your pedagogical content knowledge and not necessarily a showing of your “expert” knowledge as a Scientist or an Historian or a Writer. The opportunities will be when you are doing something. Demonstrating a technique, being metacognitive and sharing the how’s and the why’s. Alternatively consider when if you let students meet the professionals that use the information in their job that the students are currently studying? So University and industrial visits, trips  and speakers may do this on one occasion, but this does not allow them to become role models as such. So how do you have “experts” working with students over a period of time? Project Based Learning can do this.
Discovering an area of medicine that is perfect for you.	This appears to be a dream, nay fantasy scenario for teachers? How could we have lesson that students love so much that they want to spend 70 hours per week working at in their adult lives? And work in a prescribed curriculum? Answers may lie in how we balance breadth of study and depth of study. We are unlikely to become obsessed and passionate about something if we just have a surface understanding or a recall of a fact. Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High in San Diego “What is adolescence but when you try on new roles and trying on new identities?". So by providing experience of what potential the knowledge being studied has when it is applied should be part of the student experience. The relevance revealed by doing that can only motivate when studying the basic building blocks.  Project Based Learning can do this.
Being inspired by a special patient –care experience. And Seeing a patient life be saved by a medical intervention.	Both of these are inspiring and aspiring experiences, they are look “what we can achieve” moments. We can do this by modelling good work. Clearly not a “that’s a well underlined title” or “great, you got t o number 20” kind of way, but, with work that has an impact beyond the classroom. How do you design “work” for children that has a positive impact on other people? Project Based Learning can do this.
Working well with a team.	Remember this study is not about the skills of team working. It’s about the formative experiences that have the biggest impact on their emotional development and professional competence as young professionals. The study categorises this as an inspiration. So how do we design activities that allow students to be inspired by being part of team. It may be excessive to define a team, but I feel worthwhile. A group of people working towards a shared goal or purpose So, how do we design “work” that is purposeful?    Project Based Learning can do this.
Seeing a patient die, And Seeing a patient in much pain, And Seeing a medical procedure go wrong.	I don’t want to sound glib about this, but failure despite your best efforts is sometimes going to happen. I think it is significant that this happens during training. Not all experiences have to be positive. The difference here is that the medics are robust enough to take these experiences and use them in a positive way? How can we help students build their resilience to take the failures and then perform when it really matters. All of these are classified as mortality related experience which clearly has no schooling equivalent. They do however have commonalities. They all have impact on other people they are therefore important. They all require much reflection and may involve some problem solving before they next encounter a similar situation. How do we give students safe, yet meaningful experiences that will allow them to reflect on how they acted or how to overcome the problems faced? How do we help them consider next time? Project Based Learning can do this.
Realising that you are not as idealistic as you once were.	Again this is a difficult one for education, do student really have “ideals” about the subjects that study? I doubt it, and will probably never know as it is such a personal experience. However, I’m sure we have all come across an indigent teenager before?  They do have ideals and they do have an opinion about themselves and the world, and it matters. These “opinions” may not be based on facts that they have not accrued and they may not be right. The obligation for education is to allow children to work out their ideals, with all the information available (let’s call this knowledge). Ideals, however, do not exist without the context. How do provide context for student learning and experiences? How do we help students work out what ideals they have? Project Based Learning can do this.
Receiving genuinely inappropriate feedback.	How can school work ever provide genuinely inappropriate feedback? Please correct your spellings; add an adjective to describe how you think George felt when Curly shouted at him; add the units to your speed calculations. It can easily if the person who is giving the feedback does not have a good relationship with you. This may be the teacher, but, it may be someone in your team or class. Nuthall’s research on the three worlds within a classroom suggests that this is a powerful influence on classroom dynamics and who will take criticism from who. You are more likely to be defensive of feedback if you have put a lot of effort into a task. You are going to care if the feedback you get is rubbish, you may even perceive it has inappropriate. I would hope that this would not be an issue for an already well qualified and maturing medical student, but for younger students the relationships and the perception matter. However, both groups need understood and shared success criteria before feedback is given.  How do we do this so that it is clear to students? How do we make them care enough about the feedback? Well, working on something that they see as worthwhile or that they see has an impact beyond the classroom. Choice of task and choice of assessment may also provide added motivation. The feedback provided also needs to be good. How do we make sure that all feedback is good within a classroom?  Remember that a large amount of the feedback does not come from a teacher, but from other students. The work of Berger on Critique and Critiquing culture provide many solutions to this. Although Berger acknowledges that Project Based Learning alone is no magic bullet but they do provide a core that can provide experience that help these thing happen.

Teacher Model and Academic Outcomes for the Eat Book Project

Eat 1- What makes a healthy diet
UNISTRUCTURAL ·         Name the 7 food groups ·         Identify food as our energy source.	MULTISTRUCTURAL ·         Recognise that a balanced diet includes 7 components which do not have to be in equal amounts ·         Describe the role of each food group in the diet ·         Name the food tests and positive results for Starch, glucose, fats, Vitamin C and Protein. ·         Name some examples of sources from each of the food groups
RELATIONAL ·         Describe the proportions of each food group in the diet ·         Define and explain recommended daily amount. ·         Simply describe the health implications of eating too much or too little.	EXTENDED ABSTRACT ·         Explain the concept of energy balance and identify the links between the regulation of food intake, energy imbalance and health ·         Evaluate “meals” to how well they meet the criteria of a balanced diet? ·

Eat 2- What role do different nutrients have?
UNISTRUCTURAL ·          Name a range of different nutrients. (Including  examples of vitamins and minerals and the other major food groups) ·         Define a Nutrient ·         Define a symptom	MULTISTRUCTURAL ·         Give examples of where/how the nutrients are used including for main food groups and examples of minerals and vitamins. ·         Define nutrient deficiency ·
RELATIONAL ·         provide an overview of nutrient sources in the diet ·         Analyse the impact on nutrient levels when food is cooked. ·         Describe the symptoms of deficiency  of a nutrient	EXTENDED ABSTRACT ·         recommendations for the general population and apply them to evaluate the adequacy of diets; ·         Discuss how nutritional requirements of humans differ with age, amount of exercise, for food intolerance, ethical choices. ·         Identify correlations in nutrient levels and disease prevalence. ·         Analyse data about foods identifying important nutrients and their health benefits.

Eat 3- How is food digested and absorbed
UNISTRUCTURAL ·         Define Digestion ·         Define an enzyme ·         Describe digestion as the breaking down of food ·	MULTISTRUCTURAL ·         Describe how food travels around the body ( in simple terms re. the blood ·         Name three types of enzyme ·
RELATIONAL ·         Explain why digestion is needed re. size of molecules / absorption ·         Link enzyme type to food group and products of digestion ·         Link enzyme type to food group and products of digestion ·         Define digestion referring to molecule size and absorption ·         Identify the location of where different enzymes work ·         Define enzymes as specific	EXTENDED ABSTRACT ·         Use idea of diffusion to explain how food molecules are absorbed ·         Name the molecules that are produced by digestion for Carbohydrates, Proteins and Lipids ·         Use model to explain how enzymes break down food molecules ·         Link where the enzymes work to their optimal conditions ·         Explain why enzymes are specific

Eat4 – Digestive system
UNISTRUCTURAL Define the role of the digestive system Match scientific names with digestive organs on a simple diagram ·         Define a gland	MULTISTRUCTURAL Name and identify the organs Identify where digestion ends and absorption takes place Name the glands in the digestive system
RELATIONAL Sequence the organs in the digestive system Describe the process in each of the organs Describe the adaptions of each of the organs.	EXTENDED ABSTRACT Explain how adaptations for surface area and diffusion are

Eat 5- How can we trust the data on Food labels? How do Scientists Evaluate the quality of data?
UNISTRUCTURAL ·         Define Accurate ·         Define precise ·         Define repeatable ·         Define valid ·	MULTISTRUCTURAL ·         Measure to  1dp ·         Say why fair test is important ·         Simply compare calculated data and the
RELATIONAL ·         Explain why Repeat until 3 similar numbers ·         Calculate error bars? ·	EXTENDED ABSTRACT ·

Eat6 Drawing a graph.
UNISTRUCTURAL •             Axis  are titled and labelled with the correct units (Define) •             Plots are accurate and made with a  small symbol (x) (Procedure) •             Axis drawn along lines and with a ruler, neat and careful drawing	MULTISTRUCTURAL ·       A title links independent and dependent variable (Combine) ·       Average data is plotted only (Algorithm) ·       Scales are consistent and large (algorithm) ·       Independent variable on the x axis dependent upon the y axis the two axis intersect at point called the origin with coordinates (0,0)
RELATIONAL ·       Data placed into graphs to search for patterns, seen as part of process and Tables used to compare individual data (Classify) ·       Line of Best fit drawn to represent the pattern – not dot to dot(Relate/ Analyse)	EXTENDED ABSTRACT ·       Lines of best accurate and represents the data (Evaluate) ·       Anomalies identified and not used in plotting (Evaluate) ·       Lines are extrapolated following the established patterns (Create) Curved lines of best fit are smooth

Eat 7  Writing like a scientist – drawing a conclusion To be co-constructed from an exemplar
Below Standard	Working Towards Standard	AT Standard	Above Standard
·         The instructions are jumbled ·         Many Steps are missing ·         No title ·         No attempt at highlighting order. ·         No attempt to write in the third person. ·         Many sentences include words like I, we, our etc . ·         Some keywords are spelled incorrectly.	•             The instructions are mostly  in chronological order. •             Most  relevant steps are described. •             A title is given but may not be useful. •             Bullet points, numbers  are used to show the order. •             Some of the sentence are clear •             Some instructions are written in the third person. •   Useful detail is missing Some spelling errors .	·         The instructions are in chronological order. ·         All relevant steps are described. ·         A clear title indicates what the instructions are about. ·         Bullet points, number s or connectives are used to show the order. ·         Short clear sentences are used. ·         Written in the third person ·         Sentence in it. start with a verb. ·         Each sentence has a subject. ·         Specific helpful detail is included. ·         No spelling errors.

Eat8-  Correlations and Causation
UNISTRUCTURAL Define  a cause and effect relationship Define a correlation	MULTISTRUCTURAL Give examples of cause and effect Give examples of correlation
RELATIONAL Distinguish between causation and correlation?	EXTENDED ABSTRACT Identify a correlation in nutrient intake and disease occurance?

Eat 9- Calculating energy in food
UNISTRUCTURAL  Name the units that energy in food are measured in.	MULTISTRUCTURAL Describe a simple method of how to compare energy in food Identify the independent variable Identify the dependent variable
RELATIONAL Compare data referring to units inferring energy in each food type Name and control variables (Fair test)	EXTENDED ABSTRACT Calculate using the formula the energy in food

Eat 10  Science Skill – Acting Ethically- Co-construct an agreement.

Example ·         http://www.onlineethics.org/cms/9659.aspx ·         Journalists have limited time so don’t consult more than one source of info ·         Newspapers wil sensationalise articles to sell newspapers- we don’t have to!

Eat 11 Verbal Presentations- co-constructed

Example ·         What do we learn from the Humanities one? ·         Making eye contact with the audience ·         Loud and clear ·         Emphasis on keywords and important points ·         Not reading from notes ·         Speech flows ·         All words pronounced correctly ·         Confident body language ·         Keeping to time ·         Telling the audience what you’re going to the tell me ·         Telling the audience what you have told tell