My High Five

Thank you @mathsmrgordon for the nudge I required to write this blog regarding new ideas I am now using at in my classroom. I have tried to order them into how effective I think they are, but this is not necessarily a fixed order as I am constantly changing my mind. What I can say are the following 5 ideas are new to me in the past year and I have experienced them in my classroom. I would also like to point out that these are new ideas and therefore any data is empirical, based solely on my thoughts and observations, with some feedback from my HofF and a trainee teacher that occasionally is with me in my lessons. I also need to say before starting that these are not my research ideas, I have magpied them from other sources (which I think is the point of the My High Five) and that my interpretation of these ideas might not be correct, but I have used them and like them in the way I am going to describe.

1. Rosenshine's principle of instructions.

What did I learn?

When working through new material I try to follow Rosenshine's principles. I like to build upon previous material, and any new material I model, checking for understanding as I progress. The material is broken down into subsets, or atomization (1) to allow all nuances to be looked at and to allow for one subset to build upon a previous one. I constantly ask many, specific questions to check for student understanding, which I check by either random name selecting or using mini whiteboards. Once I feel students have gained an understanding I encourage independent working to allow students thinking time and to apply new knowledge to older problems. I use SSDD problems (2) for this is courtesy of. Finally I have introduced lots of low stakes testing, with the hope that knowledge is kept accessible and fresh in the students mind.

My sources.

I initially became aware of Rosenshine's work by seeing a tweet (3). I then found further explanation by Tom Sherrington (4). I will be buying his book on the topic in the near future.

Implications for future practice.

Thinking about my future practice I feel that this process will really help by allowing me to catch misunderstandings immediately. An added benefit will be that lesson planning should become easier as I am following a set routine and, by building upon my delivery from the previous year, will allow me to find extra resources for subtopics that the students struggled with.

2. Mini Whiteboards - checking A4L

What did I learn?

After listening to a podcast between Dylan William and Craig Barton (5) I was really excited about using mini whiteboards for A4L, and the potential this has to help teachers keep their lessons relevant for their students. By being able to see what students understand well, and what the class generally struggles with allows us to decide where we can speed the lesson up, or where we need to spend time reteaching (however that might be) to ensure that they understand the material. I mentioned earlier about checking for student understanding and for me this is the best way to do so.

The questions I ask can generally be broken down into three types. A quick question which gives an answer, maybe after some working out. An example might be: If a straight line graph has an equation 2y = 4x + 3, what is the gradient? The second type is multiple choice, for the previos question I might display A: 4, B: 2, C is 3 and D is 1.5. The third type might require a series of steps, such as add 2/3 and 3/5 and I ask the students to display after each step.

My sources.

I was introduced to using white boards in my teacher training, but it was one of those ideas that I was aware of but not really using. Listening to the podcast really rekindled my interest in using them, and now I can say that they are used practically ever lesson.

Implications for future practice.

I will continue to use mini whiteboards primarily as a source of A4L. However I will be introducing them more with Dual Coding (see later) and they could be used to initiate classroom discussion on the process and incorrect steps of subtopics.

3. Retrieval Practice

What did I learn?

My understanding of retrieval practice, mainly gained from the retrieval-practice website (6), is that students retain information best by trying to retrieve it themselves, and that retrieval practice should be attempted after a period of time to allow for students to 'forget' the material. I have explained to my students the difference between retrieval (attempting to get the material out of the student) and revision (me teaching the information again).

The image below shows two charts. Three groups of students were taught material slightly differently. The first chart shows how well students were able to recall materials and the second chart shows how confident the students were in their ability to recall the material. In the charts S stands for studying the material and R stands for retrieving the material. It clearly shows that students doing one session of study followed by 3 sessions of RP performed better, even though they did not feel as confident about the material. (7)




Here are some ideas I have learnt:

- implement RP by using low stakes testing. I do this by handing out a simple test before the books have been handed out. My favourite type of test is a retrieval grid, such as this one loaded I loaded to TES (8).






- Another way to implement RP is to link topics together, by interleaving and interweaving(7). By having a period of time where the students are looking at previous material, which could be unrelated to the topic being taught (interleaving) or by introducing previous topics that the new material depends upon (interweaving) we can get the students into the practice of recalling information out from their working memory.

- I think that it is important that students are comfortable with the tests, and that time is spent checking answers. If I find that students struggle with particular topic then we need to go through the topic again, either in that lesson or in a later lesson.

My sources.

My go to website (6) also send out weekly articles if you subscribe.

Implications for future practice.

After listening to a presentation that Mark Enser gave earlier this year I have moved more to interweaving ideas. Using the previous example of 2y = 4x + 3 it makes sense to spend a period of time during the lesson looking at re-arranging equations to make y the subject. The advantage of this is that I can check students understanding (by using mini whiteboards) and if they are struggling we can revisit the steps of re-arranging. Any time spent doing this reteaching is therefore is not 'wasted time' spent on reteaching material that has nothing to do with linear equations.

4. Dual coding

What did I learn?

At this years rEDDurrington I went to a presentation by (9) during which dual coding was detailed as an aid to helping students remember information better.










Simply the idea is that students (humans in general) struggle to remember too many things at once as our working memory is limited to about 4-6 items. However if we present the students with the same material in two ways, both verbal and audio, then we increase their chances of remembering it. Pritesh demonstrated this idea by using a visualiser and drawing the work out in steps, and then talking about each step at a time. This helps the students to hook ideas onto the image; later they might remember what the image looks like, now can they recall the information that goes on that image?

My sources.

The image above was produced by Oliver Caviglioli (10).

Implications for future practice.

I feel that I have just scratched the surface with Dual Coding and I will be looking into it more in the coming months. However I want to ensure that I use this process to demonstrate new material and then to get the students to show me their understanding by drawing a visual of the material (obviously using mini whiteboards) and talking to me about each stage.

5. Visible Maths

What did I learn?

Following on from dual coding I have started to look at bringing the maths to life using both Cuisenaire Rods and bar modelling,

To a student who has not seen 3y x 2y before can we use a bar model to show the answer is 6y squared? The diagram below is my demonstration to show this to my class. I used a visualiser to draw the image and took them through each step.





Obviously I then asked the students to show me what 4y x 3y was, using their mini whiteboards.
My sources.


This idea was taken from Visible Maths by Peter Mattock.

Implications for future practice.

By thinking about one of the most common mistakes I see students make, namely that y x y is 2y I was able to demonstrate to them the difference between y + y and y x y. So my aim from now on will be to find ways to use visible maths to overcome common misconceptions, as well as simply demonstrate why we get the answers we get.


There are a number of ideas in the book for using rods and bar models (as well as vectors and algebra tiles) to introduce new topics, and I will be using these in the future.

References:

(1) The concept of atomisation was introduced by Kristopher Boulton at the website https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/my-best-planning-part-1/ (@kris_boulton)

(2) https://ssddproblems.com courtesy of Craig Barton @mrbartonmaths

(3) Oliver Caviglioli https://teacherhead.com/2018/10/19/rosenshine-re-ordered-a-poster-by-olicav/ @olicav

(4) Tom Sherrington https://teacherhead.com/2018/06/10/exploring-barak-rosenshines-seminal-principles-of-instruction-why-it-is-the-must-read-for-all-teachers/

(5) Podcast http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/dylan-wiliam-author-researcher-trainer-and-assessment-for-learning-expert/

(6) Retrieval Practice https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/retrieval-practice/ @retrieveLearn

(7) My tweet from a session by Mark Enser @EnserMark at rEDDurrington https://twitter.com/search?q=%23reddurrington&src=tyah

(8) My retrieval grid for year 10s. loaded to TES: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/retrieval-grid-for-year-10-12056159

(9) Pritest Raichura @Mr_Raichara speaking at rEDDurrington, 2019.

(10)See https://teachinghow2s.com/blog/dual-coding-sketchnote-summary produced by @olicav).



(11) Visible Maths Using Representations and Structure to Enhance Mathematics Teaching in Schools by Peter Mattock @MrMattock