Here are my slides from the conference. If you would like more information about how to create instructional sequences for teaching writing components, you may be interested in my last book ‘Explicit English Teaching’
My second book ‘Engelmann in Action’ is due out very soon. This book will expand upon the ideas from the beginning of the presentation and much more.
Here are my slides from the ResearchEd National Conference 2024.
Now that year 11 have finished, schools across the country will be thinking about how they can evaluate and improve their curricula. Here are some questions, suggestions and prompts that might be helpful. You can download the whole thing as a word document at the end of the blog
Section 1: Reading and Vocabulary
Do units teach and present vocabulary to improve student responses?
Wherever possible, information should be delivered via extended reading
Possible evidence of a poor curriculum:
Possible evidence of good curriculum:
Section 2: Sequencing and Content
How does your curriculum focus on high-utility content?
You might consider the following things….
The systematic use of worked examples with minimally different tasks for students to attempt is an efficient way for novices to learn: do all units contain these?
You might consider the following things…
How does each year build upon the preceding year?
You might consider the following things…
How do you ensure that the components of final problem solving/composition/extended writing/performance are taught, mastered and gradually integrated into complex performances?
Components are individual skills/knowledge that are taught in isolation first before being combined together in wider, final performances. These could be sentence styles, mathematical steps, historical skills, specific movements in dance, data manipulation, brush strokes, chord progressions, scientific calculations etc.
Gradually integrated refers to this process:
Questions to ask:
Explain how challenge increases as a student gets older
Questions to ask:
How does it provide extensive practice, moving from guided to independent practice and building fluency for students?
You might consider the following things…
Section 3: Homework, Assessment and Evaluation
What do students struggle with and how are you fixing that?
You might consider the following things…
How confident are you that pupils remember what they are taught and what is your evidence for this?
What is the role of the Knowledge Organiser in your lessons?
You might consider the following things…
How do you know that your homework is useful and sufficiently challenging? What is the rationale behind it?
You might consider the following things…
When looking at KS4 work, what can you deduce that students need more of in KS3 to better prepare them for GCSE?
How does assessment help inform you about curriculum evaluation and student learning?
Explain how you have used a set of assessments to make changes to curriculum and what changes did you make?
Expert teachers react quickly to errors or poor performance in class, adopting strategies that result in all students practising and producing the right answer.
The more important the content, the more important it will be to ensure that all students practise and produce the right answer!
Here are some common classroom scenarios with some possible options that teachers could take in response.
All of these can be found in a downloadable word document at the end of this blog post
Scenario 1: A check for understanding using Mini White Boards reveals that less than 80% of the class don’t get it
Possible Options:
1. Pick a MWB and show it under the visualiser, explaining why it is wrong, being careful to depersonalise the error
2. Present additional examples or models and ask students to do a second minimally different CFU. If second CFU is ok, move on, if not, repeat this cycle.
3. a) Repeat the correct answer and ask students to repeat in via choral response
b) Turn and Talk: pairs discuss why answer is correct
c) Cold call student who had the wrong answer before: high chance of success now=confidence building!
Scenario 2: During independent practice in extended writing or a performance, lots of students are not succeeding
Possible Options:
1.Stop the class and move back to guided practice until you have a high success rate, then move back to independent practice.
2.3:30:30…..go and help the students who are struggling or provide them with additional support materials
3. Change your teaching to the component skills of the performance: model and get the class to practise individual component skills that make up the extended performance before gradually combining the skills together.
Scenario 3: Students cannot answer a retrieval question in the Do Now
1. a) TELL THEM the answer
b) Massed practice of the answer so they acquire the knowledge, using High Ratio Activities (choral response/Mini White Boards/Everybody writes/Turn and Talk)
Scenario 3: A cold call question results in the wrong answer following a Turn and Talk
1.Ask them to tell you what question you asked (if they cannot answer, their wrong answer may be due to them not listening)
2. a) Explain you will ask another student and they should be ready to paraphrase the answer they hear
b) ask the whole class to Turn and Talk and explain to their partners why the correct answer is correct.
Here is a link to a scene by scene summary of Macbeth, containing explained vocabulary, some useful interpretations and other helpful stuff. If you have students who need to recap or plug some urgent gaps in their knowledge, this may be really useful.
Paired discussion can be a great way to increase the participation ratio within your class, providing students with focused opportunities to practice, explore and develop ideas within your subject.
Below is a link where you can download a 2 page summary of how Turn and Talk can be used effectively. The summary covers:
Although there are many things involved in teaching English effectively, the process of helping students to access, think about and respond to challenging texts is one of the most important.
Annotations can unlock complex texts, providing students with examples, explanations and links to other, relevant and connected ideas.
Here are some ideas that may help with this aspect of the job.
Have two copies of the text
Whether you are teaching a poem, an extract or an article on some interesting and useful background knowledge that will help broaden students’ understanding of an idea, having two copies can be really useful. Pre-planning your questions and annotations on the one copy means that you can then use it as an aide-memoire in the lesson. I will often have my pre-annotated text next to the one that I am annotating under the visualiser to remind me what to focus on when teaching.
Fully complete all tasks so you understand what is required
If you are teaching an article that explores the idea of a tragic hero, perhaps to help students better understand this literary convention and therefore apply it when writing about Macbeth, you may ask students to answer text dependent questions about the text so that they can demonstrate their understanding of what they are reading. Completing the questions yourself before the lesson will help you to focus your explanations and annotations in the lesson. If they really need to understand the complex sentence on line 15, this will be a useful focus for annotations.
Annotate bit by bit
I teach using a visualiser and display my text on the projector to the class. In order to avoid the split-attention effect, I add a couple of annotations (sometimes my ideas, sometimes the ideas of students) while students pay attention and watch. I then ask students to add the annotations to their text before asking them to put their pens down and direct their attention back to the board again.
Teach Everything Needed for Success in Writing
After discussing and annotating a text, students will often write about it in order to develop their ideas and interpretations. Depending on the class or the text, the annotation process may be more teacher or student led but the goal should be to ensure that all students are able to write about the text. If they struggle with the writing, it may be that you haven’t helped them to understand enough of what they have read.
Think out Loud
Modelling annotation for a class is a means of developing their conception of what a reader (and writer) could focus on when grappling with a text. Narrating your thought process with regards to why something is interesting or striking can be really helpful. ‘This phrase seems odd: it doesn’t really fit the general mood’. ‘This line is interesting, giving a sense of…..’ ‘There seems to be a pattern here’
Board=Paper (TLAC)
If I am leading students through a tricky text, I may tell the class that ‘you need to add all of the annotations I am making but you can of course add additional ideas‘. This approach has a number of benefits. It can help to ensure that students are paying attention. It can also ensure that all students have useful explanatory information about the text, helping them to understand it. Over time, this provides students with many, many examples of how they can respond to texts, the annotations often focussing on the kind of things readers and writers can notice: imagery, links, ideas, patterns etc.
Annotate High Utility Stuff
This post, from David Didau, explores the idea of ‘creative reading’, listing some high-utility things that students ought to be looking for. I can highly recommend a book referenced in that post called ‘This Thing Called Literature’ by Bennett and Royle.
Some things that we teach are more useful than others and this is also an important idea to consider when annotating. While explaining a tricky phrase in a difficult text may be crucial for understanding that specific text, understanding this recondite component may have minimal use outside of this text. Helping students to develop the habits of mind associated with interpretation, and therefore focussing annotation on more transferable things like perspective, tone or motifs may be more useful.
Annotation and the process of learning
According to Richard E Mayer, if students are to understand what they are learning, they need to successfully engage with three stages:
This blog post explores this framework in more detail.
When whole class annotation is done well, it can ensure that students engage in all three stages, thereby making it more likely that they will understand what they are learning.
To help students select the relevant information, it may be helpful to focus annotation and teaching on what is required for success in a subsequent writing task
To help students organise the material into a coherent cognitive structure in working memory, it can be helpful to annotate bit by bit, stopping to ask students to discuss what is being annotated.
To help students to integrate it with relevant prior knowledge activated from long term memory, annotations will often explain abstruse concepts using familiar synonyms or by providing examples or non-examples that link what has been annotated to what students already know.
Let’s have a look at some examples:
The picture above shows an annotated non-fiction text that gives some useful context to Macbeth. Annotation no:1 explains a piece of vocabulary. While you could just annotate and move on, if you think that word is worthy of practising, you could do this:
1.Annotate it
2. Ask students to use it, perhaps through Think Pair Share or using Mini White Boards: Why were women expected to complete domestic duties? (Use domestic in your answer)
Annotation no:2 teaches a new piece of vocabulary (patriarchal) in conjunction with what they are reading. You could do something like this:
In the picture above, the annotation explains the word and also makes a link to connected ideas, in this case ‘The Great Chain of Being’. When student learn something for the first time, their knowledge is typically inflexible and linked to the cues that existed when they first encountered it. In order to broaden their understanding, we need to explicitly show them how concepts can be applied in different places and how they link to other ideas. This type of annotation, deliberately recycling important prior knowledge, can help with this.
After making the two annotations above, the teacher can ask a whole range of questions to get students to think about what is being suggested. Here are some examples:
Annotation no.3 gives students three options to decide from: who or what is it that has caused his hallucination? Providing options like this can help fuel a discussion.
Annotation no.4 asks students to think about who or what lures or controls macbeth, helping them to make links across the text and notice similarities.
Annotation no.5 asks students to make links between different pieces of evidence in order to build up a more comprehensive interpretation of Macbeth’s behaviour. You could ask questions like ‘How does the dagger symbolise his ‘black and deep desires’
In my last post, I outlined a number of efficient approaches for practising vocabulary. Below is a link where you can download a 2 page summary of these ideas.
The summary has some additional ideas about how to consolidate new vocabulary so that students are able to retain and apply the words to the maximum range of relevant contexts.
These ideas, as well as many others, are explained in depth in my new book
Vocabulary Practice
This is the fourth blog post focussed on vocabulary, you can find the first three here:
If you are interested in how to approach vocabulary in more detail, you may enjoy reading my new book
Alex Quigley, the writer of Closing the Vocabulary Gap, explains a helpful approach to teaching vocabulary, summarised via a memorable acronym: SEEC (Select, Explain, Explore, Consolidate)
Whatever subject you teach, there will always be far too many words and too little time to teach them all. So how can you decide which words to focus on? Which words are ‘the best’? Which words are ‘the most useful?’ These are interesting questions, which, despite not having easy or definitive answers, are queries that subject leaders and teams should be grappling with.
Some words, and these are often Tier 3 (what used to be called ‘key words’), are essential and will be taught irrespective of any disagreement with regards to the questions in the preceding paragraph. So how can we decide on what other words to teach? Here are three questions that might help:
The best words to teach have the highest utility, or to use an analogous phrase, they are transferable and give students important and flexible knowledge.
2) Explain
When we learn something new, we process what we pay attention to through different levels. This is known as the Levels of Processing Model, a framework that posits that there are three level of processing:
All three are vitally important if students are to learn a word properly and if students fail to process a word on one or more of these levels, it will result in problems.
Here are some strategies that can help with ensuring that students interact with a new word on all three levels:
Choral Response
This is great for practising pronunciation and if done well, can help ensure that students process new words phonemically. I typically say the word, give a signal, then ask the whole class to repeat it. If the word is polysyllabic and lengthy, it can be useful to segment it into morpographs or syllables to help scaffold pronunciation. For example, teaching the word ‘hierarchical’, may see me saying ‘Hire-arc-ick-al’ to help them see how to blend these units of sound when I ask them to say it fast
Choral response here is not enough though: I can watch S4C and attempt to parrot the Welsh that I hear and even if i get quite good at mimicking the words that I hear, this doesn’t mean that I understand them!
In addition, students may misremember or mishear the words and produce mondegreens or eggcorns, alternative yet plausible expressions that have meaning and yet are incorrect. One example of this phenomenon is when people say ‘I’m on tender hooks’ instead of ‘tenterhooks’. Similarly, if you think that Bob Dylan was a secret myrmecologist because he sang ‘The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind’, you have experienced the dangers of erroneous phonemic processing.
Examples, Example, Examples
One of the best ways to explain new vocabulary is to provide students with lots of relevant examples of how the word can be used within a sentence. Ideally, these examples should be initially connected to the context in which they are learning the word, before adding in further examples that demonstrate how the word can be used in different contexts. Additionally, non-examples are really useful to show the limits and boundaries of how the word can be used. The wider the range of useful examples that are presented, the broader their understanding of the word will be: examples can facilitate semantic processing as they demonstrate the meaning of the word in context.
3) Explore
We want students to be able to effortlessly apply what we teach to the widest range of relevant contexts and for this to happen, we need to set up opportunities for them to use and manipulate their new words.
Here are 4 efficient strategies for exploring (practising and manipulating) new words. All four strategies are high ratio in that they expect all students to respond in a way that focuses on meaning (semantic processing from The Levels of Processing Model)
Spoken ‘because, but, so’
The Writing Revolution popularised ‘because, but, so’ as a means of providing students with sentence based vocabulary practice. This approach works equally well with Think Pair Share or Turn and Talk.
Here’s one way of doing it:
Spoken Turn and Talk with vocabulary success criteria
Here’s how this can work:
Written ‘because, but, so’
See this blog for more information
Written: Include target vocabulary as success criteria
Here’s how this can work:
E.g. What was the problem with the Treaty of Versaille
4) Consolidate
This final stage is crucial: after all, we want students to retain what we are teaching them so that they can use what they have learned at a later date. If we want students to remember what we teach them, we should be regularly and cumulatively testing them on what they have learned. See these blogs for more information.
When thinking about consolidation, there a a few important ideas that are worth considering:
Here is a link to my presentation from the ResearchEd National Conference 2023.
If you are interested in finding out more about these ideas, you may enjoy my new book ‘Explicit English Teaching’ which is out now.
Here are a few other posts that I have written about Explicit Instruction, although most posts on my blog focus on this approach:
TomNeedham 