How good am I at explaining?

As teachers, our audience, our students can be a great source of feedback upon our craft. They see you teach more than you do. So one way to develop our ability to explain things well is not only in their understanding of the subject, but also in identifying what aspect(s) we need to improve upon. This may be a structural, signalling, clarity or supportive feature of your communication. Further details can be read here and here and here.

These features are broken down in the following student voice survey. As always I worry that a checklist in the wrong hands turns into a management tool, and that is not the intention here. So if anyone tries tell them to do one. This is a professional reflection tool, for teachers to check their own classroom practice on their own or with some feedback from their classes.
A downloadable version can be found here.

My teacher...	Always	Mostly	Sometimes	Rarely	Never
explanations are clear and understandable
goes at the right speed
teacher makes clear points
teacher loses track of what they are saying
teacher says urr, um, em during their explanations
teachers explanations emphasise important ideas
explanations contain extra, unhelpful, statements
Explanations review or summarise  key ideas
Makes mistakes when explaining
Finish the explanation
Build up/ breakdown complex ideas into chunks.
Remind me of what we have already studied
link ideas together
Make clear what they are about to explain
Make useful notes on the board
Point/ highlight key parts of diagrams or idea on the whiteboard

How to give and receive feedback from students about learning.

There is no simple answer to planning great feedback that allows your students to thrive. It is as complex as they are. I am at pains to point out that what I am about to outline is far from a complete set of ideas, but the following list may act as focusing lens to help sharpen what you see as important for the lesson you are currently planning. The culture of the classroom and the institution’s, your and your students’ perceptions are very much front and centre in the realms of feedback, so we will start with that.

Developing a culture where feedback is valued, wanted and well received?

• What routines, systems and procedures do you use to ensure that ‘threat’ is reduced and feedback will not be interpreted as a personal affront?
• What have you done to help students understand that feedback is part of the learning process?
• Do you use self and peer assessment strategies to develop student error detection and self-regulation?
• How do you value honest student responses so that errors are readily offered?

6 steps to planning receiving feedback from students.

Step 1 - Remind yourself of the lon learning intentions?

What was important last lesson?

What is important in this lesson?

What will be important next lesson?

What will be important at the end of the academic year?

Is this a threshold concept?

Step 2 - Where is the best place to focus the assessment?

Are you working on a long-term outcome that brings together many ideas and involves more complex thinking?

Are you working on short-term outcomes so repeating the information is key to longer-term learning?

What are the misconceptions, known difficulties and common errors associated with this concept or this task?

Step 3 - What exactly are you looking for?

How important is the idea? Is it a threshold concept? A known concept? A Long term learning intention?

How might student knowledge change over time or over the teaching sequence?

How will you know if the students are getting to grips with this idea? How might this change as they become more confident or understand it better?

Are you looking to see if they understand the idea, if they know the idea or that they can apply the idea?

Step 4 - Constructively align tasks and assessments.

Are you interested in them developing or constructing meaning of the idea or assessing if this has been learned?

Is there any chance for means end thinking or guess work?

Step 5 - Design assessments that you can trust.

Have I assessed the big idea more than once?

How big is the decision I will make based upon this information?

How much trust is necessary?

Do I trust that they know it? Or have they just worked it out from the clues in the assessment?

Step 6 - Make the information manageable.

When do I need this information? Can it wait for in between lessons to be processed and used?

Will sampling the class suffice?

Does having a valid assessment matter at this point in time?

How does the gathering of information fit with the flow of planned activities/ learning or the lesson?

Can a computer do the compilation of the evidence for me?

8 steps to giving students feedback.

Step 1 - Establishing the purpose of the feedback.

• Are students developing an understanding? Applying or building on knowledge? Producing work where quality matters? (Are domain skills involved)? Are they struggle to complete a task?
• Is there an opportunity to develop their self-regulation?
• Who or what is the feedback for? The student? To fulfil a policy? For observers?

Step 2 - Consider the form of feedback (or if more Instruction is needed?)

• Do students know enough for the feedback to be helpful?
• Are the tasks constructively aligned enough for task level feedback to be helpful?
• Are answer sheets, guide sheets or rubrics needed?
• Will marking codes be a useful time saver?

Step 3 - Establish a context for feedback.

• How does the teaching sequence support the current learning?
• What prior knowledge do they need to be able to act on the feedback given?
• Are the learning intentions shared, agreed or owned by the students?
• How can you make the goals clear to the students?
• Is exemplar work used to set the direction and quality of the student work?
• Is a rubric established early in the sequence of producing the work?
• Is there a way of making the feedback something that is sought by the students rather than offered by the teacher?

Step 4 - Consider the timing of the feedback.

• Is the potential feedback needed for this task or concept best if provided immediately during the activity, or might some delay be beneficial?
• Is the task best defined as a construct, demonstrate or assessment task?
• How would testing and tests be structured in this topic to aid long term retention?

Step 5 - Establish the correctness, or not, of the student learning?

• What are the signs, evidence and clues that this piece of work is on the right track?
• Is there a hinge point opportunity?
• Is the hinge point activity robust enough to exposure misunderstandings and gaps in understanding?

Step 6 - Consider how the feedback will induce thinking.

• How does the feedback narrow down the range of potential answers or solutions?
• Does the feedback avoid leading the student to use a means end or a ‘trial and error’ approach?
• What are the purposes of your planned questions? Are they to assess, to induce thinking or a convoluted form of social control?
• Is there an opportunity for students to ask high quality questions?

Step 7 - Consider how the feedback develops self-regulation.

• Is student knowledge secure enough to add potential extraneous cognitive load?
• What is the balance between securing knowledge and developing self-regulation?
• Is there a choice of meaningful tasks to follow formative assessment?

Step 8 - Set targets.

• What might you have to re-teach? How will you represent the ideas differently?
• What are the long-term goals for students with this concept?
• Is there any opportunity for “feed-forward” between tasks?
• Do some targets take precedence over other?

Further Reading

Nicol and Macfarlane Dick https://www.reap.ac.uk/reap/public/Papers/DN_SHE_Final.pdf

Hattie and Timperley http://www.columbia.edu/~mvp19/ETF/Feedback.pdf

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?