Literacy, Assessment and Memory bundles. LAMB's

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

A good start point for the view taken on literacy comes from the EEF Literacy report that states

“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.

1. As students approach mastery a delay in feedback can be beneficial, for example after an exam or marking token .
2. 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.

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.

What can teachers do to tackle student misconceptions? An example.

Posner and Strike (1992) suggest that the following conditions must be met if students are to correct their misconceptions (or to have them corrected):

• There must be some dissatisfaction with the student’s current understanding. Students are unlikely to be aware of these, and it therefore falls to us to make them purposefully aware of the ones they hold. This can be difficult, as theories” work for them perfectly well in their everyday lives, and we have to tutor students to become critical of their own thinking.
• The new conception must be intelligible or understandable to learners. This is where our skill in representing ideas specifically tailored to the learning needs of the students in front of us comes to the fore. Our assessment practices need to allow the students (and teachers) to see that they are ‘getting it’.
• The new conception must appear initially plausible; it must seem to be a better possible answer than the misconception. 
• Keeping our instruction ‘real’, rooted in what is known (i.e. their prior knowledge), making connections clear and using concrete examples all help students to alter their understanding of things.
• Finally, the new conception should suggest the possibility being fruitful or useful to them as learners. We can do this by helping students transfer their new understanding and applying it to new examples.

I would humbly add that the role of planned multiple exposures to the correct conception is also essential. Undermining hard held believes is going to take time to shift. 

Strategy 1: Encouaging dissatisfaction.

These tasks are designed to make students ware of the misconception, in a way the makes it absolutely clear that the student did not know that they did not know. For this to happen the alternate answers must at least seem plausible and contain the same kind of content as the correct answer.
The following example, fails to do this with only one plausible answer as John Fashanu, Noel Edmonds and Skeletor did not ride the Tour de France until the 1980's. That was a joke by the way, I point out this not as way of being facetious but as a way of emphasising that it is quite easy to accidently teach a misconception. 

For more on the design of multiple choice question I highly recommend this from Vanderbilt University

In this science example, students often think that the current comes from the battery, jumping out when the circuit is connected. In addition this misconception is linked to another where student believe the current is "used up".  So this dealing with this first will allow this idea to be transferred and applied to this situation. It is therefore going to be fruitful, and be part of a sequence of multiple exposures to the correct concept.

Note that only three options are given in this question , but importantly all answers are plausible.  So rather than sticking to a steadfast rule of  say "I will always give 5 options", the plausibility of the content takes precedence. 

When deliberately trying to exposure a misconception, I tend to do so with a whole class discussion. Using techniques that involves as many students as possible, for instance: asking for hands up fro each response, before asking a few students why they think what they do. Interestingly this year I had one student, almost instantly,  asking " is this about a metals delocalised electrons?" He knew the answer but was not confident about, so exposing it and reinforcing the correct answer can help those with and without significant prior knowledge on the content. If he had of been confident my tactic would have been to  defer my answer in an attempt to create a bit of ambiguity, to encourage dissatisfaction, and further thought. Normally stuidents think ( and they did even when this student spoke up) that the current comes from the battery. I try to avoid telling them that they are wrong, as I wan them to doubt it themselves first. So ambigous responses such as "mmm interetsing" help do this. 

Although, I may use a similar or even the same question in a Pre Quiz to a module, when attempting to incite some dissatisfaction with the student’s current understanding it is important that we focus on one concept at a time whenever possible. Clearly some misconceptions will have complex and interconnected reasosn so this is is not always possible. 

Strategy 2: A plausible and intelligible alternative

The next slide has my follow up to this discussion, I plan to not give the definitive answer until after the students have discussed the next slide. This slide is intended to make clear in the simplest possible terms what the correct idea is. In this case that the electrons that form the current are already present within the components of the circuit, and that on completion the battery provides a 'push' to make these charges flow. The visual shows this, and the open switch, allows for discussion of what the battery does. 

I often ask prompting questions, more or a less in this order:

1. What are the blue circles representing? 
2. What charge do they have?
3. Are they "flowing" or moving in this image? How do you know? 
4. What if the switch was closed, what would then happen? 
5. What do you notice about the amount of current before and after the component? 

This section of the lesson of the lesson attempts to do to things. Firstly have the students acknowledge that their origional think was indeed a misconception and, secondly,  present them with plausible and intelligible. Many students "get it" once they see the image and begin to articulate why they are wrong. 

I often go back to the origional question and ask who wants to change their mind. This is an importamt classroom cultural moment as praising this encourages thinking in what Doug Lemov would describe as a "culture of error". 

This image is a screen shot from the wonderful phet simulation. At this point the students are in now in need of a succinct and clear teacher summary of the correct answer, the simulation provides the perfect backdrop to this. 

Strategy 3: Realness.(Where possible)

In this lesson the students would then build a simple series circuit and measure the current at two points to show that this phenomena is real. This is also another exposure to this idea.

Strategy 4 Multiple exposure (within the lesson).

The lesson has a review based upon another model of current, comparing the bike chain to current and circuits. 

Students very quickly work out through discussion that the pedals represent the battery, the back wheel would be the component and the chain the wires. With minimal prompting they start to associate the links associate the links with the charge. following this further insights into the behaviour of current become clear. The links are evenly spaced; they dont move until they are pushed; they do not jump around the chainring (battery) if there is no pushing. This concrete example ( and therefore more plausible) helps students see their new knowledge as fruitful and leading to new understanding. 

Strategy 5: Multiple exposures (across lessons). 

As this topic develops other concepts must be added such as potential difference and resistance. These are opportunities to build on what hopefully will have become prior knowledge. A good example from future lessons is this classic teaching image. In the image the current is labelled as Amp and needs the push from the Potential difference (volt) to get moving. 

Strategy 6: Feedback.

Students are asked to describe in writing the relationship between the current, potential difference and resistance that is encaspsulated within the picture. They are asked to use the leave a line between each one that they write.  This provides a space where they can reflect on what they have written correct wrong ideas and add missing ones in the light of a model example; class discussion; teacher prompts; or teacher written feedback. 

A copy of the lesson resources are available here 

An update on the Meta-cognitive wrapper. Why and How to use them.

The metacognitive wrapper in many ways is the perfect storm of a metacognitive strategy, in both its structure and procedure. It structure utilises prior knowledge, and engages both strategic thinking and motivation, while it’s procedure beginning before a task or lesson has begun allows students to gain some form of control over their thinking and emotions from the off, and then orchestrate their thinking over the duration of the lesson. The wrapper wraps around the lesson or task, ensuring that reflection occurs and that long term metacognitive behaviours are valued, promoted and developed.

Put simply a metacognitive wrapper is a task that is completed at the beginning and at the end of an activity or lesson, and is designed to help students plan or at the very least consider their thinking over a lesson. The integration of thinking and content and the opportunity for forethought have big impacts on learning ^[2] Studies have shown the metacognitive behaviour of self-questioning to have the biggest effect if carried out before the lesson, while slightly lower after the lesson and much lower during the lesson^[3]. Common sense would suggest that trying to be self-questioning during a lesson could be distracting to all but the most able learners. Echoing what we know about the types feedback most useful to beginner learners that complex feedback while learning can be overwhelming, and should be corrective in nature and focussed upon content knowledge. The wrapper caters for this by emphasising metacognition before and after the act of learning.

Wrappers tend to have a consistent of design although the components are not always equivocal, and some will not be useful for every task.

Designing the wrapper

1. Learning intention should be referenced.

A wrapper should firstly include a statement to make clear what the students are about to learn. This should be broad terms with only sufficient detail to make clear the types of ideas and thinking that may be useful.

2. Prior knowledge should be prompted.

The first question should always prompt useful content knowledge. It is preferable to phrase this speculatively as in:

“What might you already know about …? 

The “might” helps keep possibilities open early in the lesson granting opportunity to come back to these original thoughts, so that students can validate, dismiss or correct them or even become more confident in their own thinking. Although it must be noted that becoming less confident in their knowledge is just as valid a response, as they could either be unlearning a misconception, which is a difficult process or be questioning why they believe something rather just accepting something is right. That is to say, they can practice being metacognitive.

3. Student goal setting.

The third element is a target setting one that could be the visualisation of a success criteria or the setting of a self-reward for success. This could this be a way of tapping into the intrinsic learner motivation? Findlay and Cooper (Locus of control and academic achievement ) demonstrated that those students who are internally motivated perform better than those who delegate this responsibility. An alternative focus may be to ask about the usefulness of what is being is learned, as task value is a powerful metacognitive strategy (DeBoer)

What do you want to learn about “Electromagnets” today?

Or

How will you know that you are being successful today?

Or

Why is it important that we understand why “earth quakes” happen?

4. Prompting Strategic thinking.

Students will benefit from help in working out concrete ways of engaging with the learning task.  This may be structuring their thinking or how they could go about completing the task. For example:

What steps will you need to take to complete this task?

or

What ways of thinking might help you solve this problem?

5.Affective control: Learner attributes.

The final element to a wrapper is to focus on a learner attribute such as motivation or being resourceful. This is often the quickest win for the students and for the teacher.

How motivated are you today?

or

How resilient are you feeling today?

Finally prepare the end part of the wrapper by changing the tense of the questions. So What do you already know about…?” turns into “Was the knowledge you had useful?”, or “How might you plan your work to ensure quality?” turns into “did your plan help you structure your work in a high quality way? The premise here is to allow them to recognise changes: in what they know,: in  how confident are they in this knowledge In how to go about solving this kind of problem, after all change is learning.

Procedure for using a wrapper.

The process of using a metacognitive wrapper is a simple one, albeit with nuance. It starts with

1.Student individual thinking time.

Have the questions selected available at the start of the lesson. You may need to introduce the lesson topic, the purpose of these questions and to make clear the idea that it is OK to be wrong at this point in time, but little more. Allow the students 4 or 5 minutes to ponder and note down their ideas.

2. Whole class response.

Randomly select a few responses for each of the posed questions and record upon the board thereby make their thinking visible. Make a point after the initial trawl of asking if anyone has something to add. There is no need to judge any responses as right or wrong at this point even if their response is a negative one such as "I'm not motivated today ", as they have already engaged in the type of thinking you require. The important part here is that we communicate through the procedure that “your motivation matters and it is your responsibility.” However, be aware of bandwagon jumping with negative comments. Peer culture is very strong, and if you find yourself with growing negativity and students playing to the crowd. If so, challenge it by making it clear what the culture for learning needs to be like for their success. This may not happen overnight, but must start somewhere. Why not here? The students are voicing opinion of their schooling, they are engaged in what you want them to be engaged in.

Seeking multiple responses provides the students with a palette of choices they can make. Simple phrases like “You can steal any of the ideas you hear.” encourages students to begin to reflect on best methods of working and make active choices.

3.The lesson or the task.

Although the procedure does not require the teacher to actively promote metacognitive thinking, you will be sensitised to how the students are going about the learning process. alongside the teacher led conversations of a classroom, you will have opportunity prompt some individual students in controlling their metacognition. The language of choice and the use of ambiguous responses to their questions, such as “could be”, encourages student ownership of the problem at hand, and therefore gain some experience in utilising their metacognition. Some students will require highly structured choices, as in “you can either do A, B or C” while others will be able to respond to “So what are your options here?” Ultimately the students must make the decision of what they do next.

4. Individual reflection.

Using the end wrapper questions, once again a moment to reflect and prepare responses. Ask the student to note down their responses.

5. Whole class debrief.

Again, selected at random, although through the discourse of the lesson you may want to highlight particular students who may have been successful (or not) in controlling their thinking, changing their minds, getting unstuck or being resilient. There is no need to record their responses as what important here is the conversation that debriefs their process. You are likely to hear are stories of improvement and by highlighting these attributes within a specific learning activity helps makes them more visible to all learners. Each part of this review is important: the content, the strategies, the feelings, the attributes, as all are intertwined in the experiences of the students (Nuthall)

The motivation to engage is a vital part of the process, so I tend to use this as one of the prompts more often than not. The conversations around motivation are always interesting and often highlight its fluctuating nature as the lesson ebbs and flows, but how if we are aware of it we can begin to learn how to control it. It is best summarised by an anecdote from a first-year teacher following a training session. He had a busy day, a full teaching day, coursework marking with a looming deadline, a lunchtime mentor meeting and then an afterschool training session on the charms of metacognition. He said as much as we started. All I could do was to thank him for his response and for being there. The session went well and we concluded by going back to the wrapper task. He could not wait to respond to this. At first, he accused (in the best sort of way) me of “tricking him into being motivated”, We revisited the original questions and as we did the conversation became centred around who had made it important. He responded “it was me, I made it important, I was tired and had didn’t want to be here, but I realised that my motivation was important and I had to find a way of being motivated”. The focus became how he as learner had taken control of his thinking and actions. he had become metacognitive. Learners often just need the chance to catch themselves doing it, if I had challenged the unmotivated response of the teacher or of students then I could prevent any chance of this experience and realisation taking place. In essence, the teacher needs mechanisms to keep themselves out of the way to allow students to practice self-monitoring while completing tasks and learning. So, the next step in increasing student self-regulation and metacognition is to increase student control.

---

[1] https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/metacognition/teaching_metacognition.html Accessed 29/07/17

[2] Hattie, Biggs and Purdie 1996: Effects of Learning Skills Interventions on Student Learning: A Meta-Analysis

[3] Huang 1991: A Meta-analysis of Student Self-questioning strategies

The hidden structure of teacher explanations

Purposes of teacher talk.

Before we can consider the structure of a teacher explanation we must first consider the purpose of that talk.
Teachers talk a lot. And so we should. Much of the visible art of teaching comes from the moments when we open our mouths. With between 10% and 30% of lesson time being spent explaining, we must be confident that this is time well spent and that our explanations are effective. Teacher talk is a mix of content explanation with talk of motivation, emotions, strategy, instructional guidance, questioning and feedback. As befitting something that is aimed at developing an understanding of other people, teacher talk is far from a simple construct. 

For me teachers talk mainly for the following 11 reasons: 

• Context setting.
• Engage and maintain interest.
• Represent new information.
• Emphasise the important.
• Differentiation.
• Build a narrative.
• Sharing Procedural knowledge.
• Guide students to generate the knowledge themselves.
• Summaries and Plenaries.
• Stimulate student thinking.
• Build and maintain relationships within the classroom

Legitimate Code Theory as an analysis tool.

Although teacher talk is a very visible part of our craft, the actual structures within it are not, or at least they are shrouded in complexity. So stumbling around the internet the other day,  I came across the field of Legitimate Code Theory (LCT), which claims to among other things,to help to make the "invisible visible" in order to reveal the rules of the game. Now as a dyed in the wool Nuthalian this intrigued me. This blog, incidentally , is not about LCT, I know way too little to explain it or to have an opinion of its use, although there are some case studies of its use in classrooms that I would like to explore.  Being able to see why the art of teacher talk is successful is always an opportunity not to be missed. So, I watched this video, which is (hopefully) embedded to start at the relevant part, although watching it all is recommended.

Professor Karl Maton explains the background of this case study, describing the same class in the previous academic year as unruly and under-performing. They had been transformed one year later, with a different teacher. Now, teaching is complex and many factors may be at play, but due attention is made to the teacher. So they asked a the guiding question “Why did the teacher spend more time teaching content than the previous teacher?” To do this they attempted to isolate three simple focuses of  the content; the directions or instructions given; and the behaviour of the students. I like the simplicity of this and how they are able to track these through teacher talk with the LCT matrix. 

The matrix used to analyse the teacher talk and strategies requires some thought. I am happy to admit that I am below novice on the subject of LCT and this video is very much my introduction to it. So I hope that this simplified matrix  helps make clear what it looks like. I think it helped me follow what was happening and relate it to teacher skills. I hope it's not too simplified to be insulting to an expert in the field.

Maton uses the phrase a "autonomy tour" to describe the process of moving between the quadrants of the matrix. For instance starting talking about content, then leaving and talking about other concepts, process, ideas and then returning to the original content. Maton sees this as a way teachers can integrate knowledge. So in this case the content being taught is integrated with directions for students and expectations of behaviour. By doing so students see a model more than just the content, for instance how to select and use examples from sources as shown by the teachers use of video. Fellow Nuthalians will hear loud and clear Nuthall's first premise of "students learn what they do". Maton goes onto suggest that this teachers success with this class is down to this integration. I especially like Maton’s phrase "bring it back home" to emphasise that this teachers talk, although not exclusively about the target content, finds a connected way of returning back to what he was trying to teach. Everything is therefore about learning the content. It strikes me that this a method that Expert Teachers would use to increase the amount of redundancy in their teacher talk- they find other ways of saying the same thing. 

Analysis

The teacher talk begins on content and solely about the content. Each picture will have the teacher talk, the current code or type and purpose of the talk and any moves that is being made across the matrix as the teacher takes a "tour". It is important to realise that the desired quadrant, that of talking about this lessons core content is only desirable for this lesson. Other situations will require talk or actions in differing parts, and indeed in this situation how other parts support the learning of the core content.

This is followed by content away from the specific content being taught, but it is still 

subject knowledge that the students will cover later in the year. So remains in the “home” quadrant, but with a lesser relationship.

Talk then stops even being about the subject, and is now about students own experience. Briefly leaving the home quadrant and where the importance of what is being said is beyond this lesson, but there is a link that the teacher is exploiting to bring student experience to mind. This is another feature of what I would recognise as an expert teacher strategy. Expert Teachers increase the relevance of the material being taught to the students. 

This is not just shallow, hat tip towards the kids, this relevance is used to engage the students, before returning back to the main content with the all important why. By stating this he is increasing the relevance of the content., another expert teacher behaviour.

He then goes out again to make clear some other knowledge, and everyday experience that will make subsequent content discussion more understandable. Again this is a nice example of an expert teacher making the content more relevance, but this time by establishing useful prior knowledge.

Once more the teacher talk returns to the core concept being taught, making this a good example of an expert teacher getting back on track. That is to say, despite the explanation necessitating an off topic idea,  in this case hygiene, it is woven back into the narrative of being under siege in a castle. The knowledge is once again brought back home.

Structure of the explanation

Hidden within this narrative is another Expert Teachers behaviour that of being able to problematise the concepts being taught. Explanations are composed of three simple parts; a problem to be explained, a person to do the explaining and someone to explain to.  Yet, I would wager that we teachers sometimes rush, or skim or worse still miss the problem part out all too often. The reason for this is obvious, we know the answer. The problem teachers face when dealing with this is desirability; our knowledge, the correct knowledge, is what we want our students to have. However, this ambition can cause us to forget that the vastness of the difference in the depth and quality of knowledge that we possess, as subject experts and that of our students. We simply see things in a more holistic, joined up and detailed way. The temptation to delude ourselves by telling students just ‘the facts’ is therefore pretty strong. So he sets  up a problem to teach to. The choice of reading material helps, by giving a bigger overview. This reminds me of Nuthall’ second premise “ effective activities are built around big questions.”

But the teacher spots the problem, or might that be an opportunity, to explain. The text only uses the word "disease" and this is what he focuses his narrative upon. He set it up, by following up the reading of the text with a context in which the students are to think and learn. He says something like " What this text is about is the importance of castles and what happens when the castle is under siege" This "what happens when" is the problem setting part of his explanation. This is one way Expert teachers problematise their teaching. 

The lesson moves on requires use of a video. In some ways, when teachers do this they are delegating responsibility for the explanation to someone else. Part of the problem is that videos will contain a lot more information than the core ideas the teachers wish to get across. Some of which will not be germane. So their selection, and use requires a great deal of thought from the teacher. In doing so this teacher demonstrates another two expert teacher behaviours: that Expert Teachers are more selective in the choices of example they use and they increase the relevance of the material being taught to the students. As this teachers talks he constantly talks about the content, the "what" and the “why”. He does this for both the content, directions and behaviour. It is in this talk that he directs students to the relevant materials and ideas. His direction towards the relevant bits starts with the simple prefixing of the video with questions

Importantly,  it is the teacher talk and discussion that ensures the knowledge is brought "back home". 

The video then takes us on a tour of the teacher instructional structure.

It starts with a directional focus

the video is then described as a combination of educative and entertainment content, that is not (yet) related to the core content being taught. It cross two quadrants as it is loosely content related and context setting.

The teacher then returns to the content by prompting students to answer the first question. At this point it becomes clear that this teacher is highly structured in his explanations/ lesson. Expert Teacher do provide more structured explanations than non expert. The intriguing thing for me, as a teacher, is that this is pretty much invisible in his communication, but by golly it is there. in his teaching...

... and in the elaborations he makes to the student responses. The knowledge is brought back home.

Another "autonomy" tour is then started  by setting directions and making clear the "why" of the process.

The conclusion drawn is that the teacher success comes from the integration of content, direction and behaviour so that:

Thoughts

I have just come across LCT as an idea, and it feels useful. Now I am not sure if this because I recognise, the behaviours and aspects of the teaching that allows me to follow Matons narrative, and whether I would see the "invisible" in a context that I am less aware of remains to be seen. But I am intrigued. What I find useful is the slowing down and examining of a teachers art to see the skills and behaviours that make what they do visible and therefore learnable.

Since watching, two strategies have become clear to making my explanations better. Firstly, I have been keen to ensure I keep purposes clear for students, giving clear why to content and to task. Secondly, I have been aware of where of the extra content needed to make new learning accessible and most importantly how to bring it back home. This requires thought of not only when to introduce it, but when to integrate it. This is pedagogical content knowledge in its purest form- how are our subject learned.