Exploring a love of learning in an online environment - how to adapt our favoured approaches at Mangotsfield.

When deciding on the direction that this terms' CPD should take, utilising feedback from staff voice was a must. As a result of the 33 members of staff who generously offered their thoughts on adapting to an online environment, Mango Moments considers how teaching strategies favoured to promote a love of learning can be easily adapted to engage our students whilst supporting our established routines. This blog post includes strategies to retrieve, model, engage and provide whole class feedback. It's a plethora of modified initiatives, partnered with the outcomes from my half term reads of 'The Feedback Pendulum' by Michael Chiles and 'Retrieval Practice 2' by Kate Jones. Please do let me know if you wish to borrow either of these books.

How can we encourage retrieval?

Retrieval practice is the art of trying to recall knowledge when it is not directly in front of you. As Kate Jones writes 'all information stored within short-term memory which is not rehearsed will be lost within 18-30 seconds'. Throughout term 6 of the last academic year, a great deal of time was invested in the sharing of strategies to promote opportunities for students to integrate knowledge from their working memories into their long-term memories. 

Many of the strategies we share on this blog have emerged from evidence based practice and the need to interleave our curriculum's. Our knowledge rich curriculum is built around routine moments in students learning episodes where low stakes quizzes, challenge grids, think-pair-share and brain dumps encourage and rehearse this retrieval. In Term 1 templates were shared, strategies suggested and many departments worked tirelessly to identify those that supported their individual curriculum's. But then this new lock-down appeared and based on staff and student feedback, many of these strategies were not utilised in our new live lesson format. So let's shine a reset light on how they can be adapted to work online. Below I share examples of two strategies I have trialed with my GCSE classes last term; Challenge Grids and Cops and Robbers/Memory Lane. 

In this past Mango Moments blog, Challenge Grids were discussed as a tool to allow students to revisit learning from previous topics and years. But how this can be used during live lessons involves a simple GoogleSlides twist. Produce your challenge grid as normal, my example is shown opposite. Ensure you indicate to students which questions require more depth to their answers or are retrieved from a longer time period ago and therefore equate to more points. Once formatted, copy and paste the slide multiple times, and allocate each slide to one student in your class. So my Year 10 version has 30 slides whilst my Year 11 has 27, dependent on the number of students I have.  As you can see within my second image, I can then select grid view (a small icon in the bottom left) and see every students copy of their slide. When assigning this to students, ensure you select 'every student can edit the file' and then they all have permission to work on the one document.  

The benefits of this approach? You are able to see every students work simultaneously (I can't be the only one who grows frustrated by the need to open 30 separate GoogleDocs). This saves great time when sampling students work to provide live whole class feedback, encouraging students to view each other's work and provide peer feedback and most importantly enhance engagement through the obvious public accountability of work completion. 

The drawbacks? Setting the ground rules is a must - students must be respectful of each others slides. Copy and paste is obviously a hazard, but with a quick discussion regarding the ability to look at the 'edit history' I have found students to be courteous of each others work. 

Memory Lane/Cops and Robbers is a two for the price of one. Do you need a strategy that acts as a 'do now', ensures student engagement can be moderated and also offers opportunities to retrieve - this is my go to! Providing a series of sub topics that link to the key learning for the lesson and ask students on arrival to the session to note down anything they can recall underneath these headings in the boxes provided. This is the cops part of the session. 

Once students have been given an adequate amount of time to retrieve, provide them with the opportunity to steal ideas from each other. If you format the activity as I have previously mentioned on a shared GoogleSlide, then students can skip between each others slides to steal said ideas. A note of caution here - ensure that what students are stealing is correct! Direct them where necessary to specific students who demonstrate a strong grasp of subject content, providing live feedback and demonstrating positive reinforcement in action! 

Surely there is no fix for engagement when students have their screens off? #eduwitter has been transfixed with the debate regarding safeguarding versus engagement on this exact matter over the past few weeks. Whilst the comparisons between primary and secondary school GoogleMeets has led to the creation of many hilarious memes, it is scarily apparent that with screens off there is a huge challenge over guaranteeing student engagement. I for one have been subject to those tumble weed moments when you cold call a student to be met with silence, a blank GoogleChat and then the ultimate line "Sorry miss, my hamster just ran over my keyboard and shut my computer down!" - then "How are you writing in the chat?" I always want to ask?

Cold calling is great for keeping students on their toes, I often utilise this in partnership with the chat function. All students start their live lessons with a low stakes quiz in Geography and naming specific students to share their answers in the Googlechat has generally produced positive responses.

Whiteboard fi has been one of my top discoveries. Issuing each student with their own digital whiteboard, it allows for every student to display their answers to low stakes quizzes, worked examples live and you can instantly see which students are not engaging despite being online. I am aware there are colleagues who use similar post it note style apps with their classes, all of which follow the same premise of sharing ideas and collaboration. 

Try asking all students to share their views, opinions, ideas by posting in the chat but the catch being they can only press submit when you ask them to so there is less tendency to write whatever the first student to press enter has written. As I mentioned in my previous blog, the raise hand function is also ideal for those moments when a hinge question (true or false style) is needed to ensure the lesson can move forward, whilst also checking students haven't snuck back off to their beds once they've joined the meet. 

Guided Reading can also be utilised to encourage engagement - assign an article, poem, text, source etc (shared for all students to edit) and ask them to collaborate in small groups to highlight key words and phrases, create a suitable heading for each paragraph and produce summative comments/annotations for their peers. Whether on a GoogleDoc or a Google Slide, producing the 'Group Annotations' column and asking students to type in different colour fonts allows for quick recognition of participation. 

Setting documents for all students to edit promotes opportunities for Kagan structures. Consider using think-pair-share or All Write Round Robin as structures that are adaptable to an online environment in which students record their thoughts in the chat or on a shared document. 

Can I do, we do, you do still be used to model?

Of course! I have given it a small rename for the online environment - I have asked my students to 'make it better'. Whilst in class producing a live modeled answer to your classes might be a natural go to (especially if you have a visualiser), it is often harder to produce the I do 'live' if you have even a touch of a lagging internet connection!

Reading through the I do with the class has a limited level of impact, so following feedback from my Year 11 class in particular I found that producing an answer that was slightly sub par that they had to develop or re-write was a more effective approach when they were not physically in front of me. 

As you can see from my example above, my intention was for the students to apply their knowledge from earthquakes to an 'evaluation' style exam question. I produced an exam answer (seen in red) that would be worthy of 3 marks out of 9. Students were then asked to use the paragraph plan suggested to make it better as a class - this was the we do. Students were then presented with a very similar style exam question to that shown and asked to produce their own independently for the 'you do'. 

And how about feedback? Are these strategies promoting efficient opportunities to utilise whole class feedback? 

James Gilpin was wonderful enough to trial the shared GoogleSlide approach at a similar time to myself. I know he won't mind me mentioning that following a telephone conversation between us, he was ready to try something new with his GCSE classes. Opposite is a screenshot of his class working concurrently on an exam question. James was able to live mark to show students where they were accessing specific parts of the markscheme, provide whole class feedback and scaffold their next steps. 

As Michael Chiles states in his new publication 'The Feedback Pendulum' "create opportunities for pupils to read their peers work, which will generate greater awareness of the solutions required for their own pieces of work". As with my earlier example of 'make it better', showing students each others work alongside one where you have made deliberate errors will inform students on what they should not be doing and help them to prepare not to repeat this in their own work. 

To provide whole class feedback on work produced online is not new. After a lesson in which students produce a piece of extended writing, I will make notes on the strengths, a list of errors or common misconceptions, spelling mistakes and any other areas of improvement.

Feedback that is shared as close to the learning episode as possible is the most effective and the aim should be to move learning forward. When providing this during this current online environment it can naturally be in the Try Now format. Alternatively, produce a feedback guide such as that shown opposite. Review the responses to key knowledge checking questions and alongside the correct answer (in green), note the common class misconceptions in red. 

I fully appreciate that there are multiple strategies to digest in this particular blog. The final point from me, as is always the case, is find a strategy that works for you and your classes. What works for one cohort, does not always naturally transfer to another. Take time to trial, modify and adapt. Be prepared to make IT mistakes, I frequently have and the students have been wonderfully supportive. Throughout this term we will be asking for your ideas - please do consider the adaptations you have made. We would love to hear of your strategies, maybe you are even willing to share a snapshot of a lesson with us in a future CPD. Please send any ideas to either myself, Tiff or Clio to be shared in forthcoming CPD elearns. 

Thank you all for taking the time to read this post.

How do I ensure I plan effective lessons for an online environment?

 DQ: How do I ensure I plan effective lessons for an online environment?

It was Wednesday of the first week of this new lockdown when I stumbled across the diagram above on edutwitter. It instantly spoke to me, its simplified, cyclical approach provided much needed reassurances for how to approach the planning of live lessons. I assume that we all felt an element of panic in that first week, despite my 16 years teaching experience I felt decidedly disjointed. The main concern I had was over how to ensure my live lessons closely mirrored the routines and expectations I had established in school, so that minimal learning was lost. Let’s explore the elements of the above that are to do with planning...

1. Plan the curriculum: Ensure that the students are informed of the bigger picture. What are they learning and why are they learning this? Closely mirroring what students would have received should they be in school naturally feeds into greater engagement. This might look different depending on whether you are live teaching specific key stages or using e-learns but what is allowed for is support for both the students and you as a teacher to check for completion, gaps, next steps and engagement.

2. Plan the inputs: My mantra here - do not overplan! Keep to the basics; 

• Promote retrieval by starting with a do now task - knowledge retrieval, low stakes quizzing, GoogleForm etc.

• Introduce the content but with minimal teacher talk - the feedback has been that listening to a ‘lagging’ teacher can cause students to switch off straight away. If its new knowledge, can you find a video clip that delivers the much needed content or an article the students can read and discuss in a Guided Reading format? Just ensure you present the new information in small chunks and with worked examples. 

• Ask lots of questions - cold calling has taken some adjustment when you wish not to lose time to students writing their answers into the chat. In the classroom, posing the question and then stating the students name ensures all are kept on their toes but online naming the student first and then posing the question is more effective for maintaining the pace. 

• Model excellence (see I-We-You lower down).

• Explicitly teach vocabulary - by my own admittance, this I neglected in the first week and it came back to haunt me with vengeance. Whilst delivering a discussion on mitigation and adaptation to Year 11, I immediately launched into a discussion of strategies and asked the students to categorise them under the headings above. But how could they when we had not retrieved and consolidated what the two ideas meant to start with. After my do now task, I now explicitly pick the three key words for the lesson and check/reinforce their meaning in the GoogleChat.

• Check for understanding - ensure students have the same opportunities you would afford them in class to apply their knowledge. How are you going to ascertain their level of understanding if they do not produce any written evidence?

• Provide regular feedback (listen to the feedback video in the e-learn).

3. Plan the students tasks:

• Consider setting up a GoogleSlide document that the students all have editing access to. Allocate each student one slide (named) but formatted the same way on them all. As they produce the work, under your instruction, you can observe their progress and they can collaborate with each other. This also provides great access to whole class feedback that is live and mid lesson as you can switch from slide to slide with ease and pace.

• With KS4 producing exam questions from scratch has proven tricky to produce to a good standard. Students have therefore benefitted from the use of ‘say it again, say it better’ but in a written format. Provide them with an exam answer that is not quite good enough - ask them to make it better by focusing on developing the answer, improving its SPAG and rearranging its format. The feedback from this approach has been overwhelmingly positive, as long as students are provided with their own GoogleDoc that they can edit and adjust easily.

• Continue to model using I-We-You. Ensuring that students have the standard required modelled is teaching 101. Using the tools at your disposal, produce the ‘I’ (the part you as a teacher write) and display throughout the lesson on a GoogleSlide or GoogleDoc presented on the meet. The ‘We’ can easily be built upon in the GoogleChat. Ask students to produce their own answers by typing in the chat, but do not let them press enter until you instruct them to do so. Read through all the answers submitted and produce an answer using the ‘best bits’. 

• Often students are nervous to share ideas in the forum of a chat or verbal contributions. A good way to pose a question, give a time limit and then a countdown to hit enter. Impromptu polls are best developed using the raise hand - this is a great tool to support that important hinge question before you move learning forward. True or False quizzes work well with the raise hand also (click it if you think a statement is true, don’t if you think it is false). 

Please be reassured, these are all suggestions and this is a steep learning curve for us all. My final word of advice, what works for one class might not work for another. You must adapt, mould and trial new ideas one at a time. Give them time to embed and do not expect results immediately. Be aware of student wellbeing, IT access and the general level of engagement so far - reflect at the end of each lesson on what went well and what you would change. Finally, talk to colleagues, talk to your mentors, talk to your departments. Share the workload, share ideas and engage in the camaraderie that Mangotsfield is known for. 

Making every moment count - how to avoid lost learning by the English Department

Now more than ever, we are continually reminded of the impacts of lost learning. Daisy Christodoulou tweeted that, based on recent evidenced research into Year 7 writing levels, the average student was 22 months behind where they should currently be. This stark reminder of how students prolonged absence from school, and the realisation that virtual learning does not replace the learning environment that prospers when students and their teacher share the same physical space, has led us at Mangotsfield to the need to reassert that making every lesson, and indeed every second count is beyond important. This term, CPD will be run by various departments, whose expertise within specific areas has been recognised. To ensure we all are reminded of the need for lessons to start with pace, that students are engaged on their immediate arrival into a classroom and to utilise every second with a love of learning, the English department have kindly shared their thoughts.

Johnny Suttle expertly writes: In the English department we feel it’s really important to make every single moment of each lesson count. Simply put there are two simple reasons we want to do this:

1. To establish pace and rhythm in every lesson.
2. To enable us to recap content or embed vocabulary without eating into too much lesson time.

Lesson Starts: A good pace to a lesson is vital, but the first few moments are possibly the most vital of all. It sets the tone for the learning experience and informs students of your intentions for how they approach learning in your classroom. It generates the feeling amongst students that they are moving along and that they are going somewhere in the lesson. This instantly gives the lesson more meaning and purpose to them, they can get their teeth into it and consequently a well-paced lesson holds their attention and students who are paying attention learn. 

The beginning of a lesson when the students enter the room is the first indication they get of what type of lesson is in store for them. It is where you establish the expectations you have for your lesson and to borrow a saying ‘what you permit, you promote’. If you let your students come in and have a lazy, laid back start you are permitting time wasting, you are signaling that time in your classroom is easy come easy go. On the other hand if you are communicating your expectations to the students that every second in your room counts then they will respond in similar style. Making such a start routine also has hugely beneficial results on behavior management. A pacey lesson give students fewer opportunities to misbehave. In addition you can use the activities that create a prompt and efficient start to build routines into your lessons and routines are the bedrock for behavior management. As Tom Sherrington says ‘if everyone knows how to respond and what happens in various situations, then it allows the focus to be on learning'. So this leads us to look at English. How do we start every lesson in a manner that has established a routine in which students arrive in our classrooms and know how they are expected to act and respond and therefore begin learning the moment they walk through the door.

KS3 English Lessons:

Each of our KS3 lessons commences with a vocabulary starter and are employed purposefully to build tier two words. Alex Quigley, in his excellent book ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap’ talks about the importance of embedding and building a student’s vocabulary and talks about tiers of words. Tier one words are the ones used in basic everyday conversation, Tier three words are ones that are very specific to a subject I .e. ‘oxymoron’ in English or ‘Sodium Chloride’ in Science. Tier two words are the words that fall in between. The more complex words that allow us to express ourselves in a more nuanced way but with which students may not be familiar. An example would be looking at the difference between the words ‘sad’ and ‘dismayed’. If our students were to read this word they would need to first be able to recognize it and then to be able to articulately convey the more intricate emotions provoked by a sense of ‘dismay’. Equally in their own writing we need them to use this vocabulary appropriately. We want students to understand a sentence such as ‘the man was dismayed when his house burned down’ doesn’t really make sense and that they would need a broad enough vocabulary of tier two words to instead employ a synonym of ‘sad’ that would more accurately describe how someone would feel in this situation. 

So hence the importance of these starters. However we also have an English curriculum to get through and only three lessons a week to see the students. To be able to fit in the building of this important vocabulary as well as the main content requires us to make every second count. To achieve this and to embed links between the vocabulary and the main lesson focus we have split our KS3 curriculum into six themes that link to themes also found at GCSE. For each theme we have compiled a list of 15 tier two words which are linked to that theme and which we want our students to use. Then the first slide in every lesson has the driving question, and tasks based around this word (see example slides below). This ensures that the moment a student walks into the classroom they can get out their book and start building their vocabulary. Five minutes spent on this task and five minutes of feedback eliciting student response and they have built their vocabulary yet still have a significant amount of the lesson left to learn the main content. We are also savvy in our choices of the tier two word picked from the list in each lesson. We aim to pick ones that match the content of lesson so that having encountered the word in the starter they can then practice using it in the lesson. This allows us to tie our prompt start into the rest of the lesson further add a sense of purpose write from the first minute.

A final thought on KS3 (and indeed KS4) is we also frame our verbal directions and questions directed at the students through these words. Take the words in the starter above as an example I might wait outside my room and say ’I am going to be vociferous in demanding you enter my room right now’! 

KS4 English Lessons:

In a similar manner we need to maximise every minute of our KS4 lessons as there is so much information for us to get through and for students to retain. We therefore use our starters to help us interleave the content we have previously studied alongside new material. 

Our starters meet one of Rosenshine’s key principles of instruction in that they allow us to review learning on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Rosenshine notes that it is 'important to strike a balance between covering a lot of material and also providing time for sufficient practice' and that is what we aim to do. Each term KS4 lessons have what we term a ‘main focus’ and a ‘recap’ focus. If for example the main focus is preparing them for their Language Paper 1 exam then the recap focus will be the starters used to retain knowledge of a text they have covered the previous term, perhaps Macbeth. The battle here again is to maximise time. We need to keep the Macbeth information fresh in the students mind but we have to teach them the new Language exam content, as Rosenshine says we need to strike a balance. This is where a prompt lesson start is so important. If the recap starter slide is on the board from the moment students walk in the door, they can get started instantly and just as with KS3 there can be 5 minutes spent on independent work, 5 minutes eliciting feedback and 50 minutes of lesson time remains, at the same time the lesson has started with that strong rhythm and pace that conveys purpose to the reader.

The slide opposite is an example of a typical recap starter. One of the key factors in the success of such a starter is how open ended it is. If a student arrives early they can really sink their teeth into this and are able to recall lots of different aspects of the play (quotes, events, contextual information) to support their point. However even if a student arrives late they are still able to make a start at the task as they can quickly select a word and then you can use questioning to draw out their thinking. 

It is important that a starter can be attempted in whatever time the students have available as otherwise a student who is already late and disengaged will feel there is not point trying to start and then even if the lesson pace is fast for everyone else it will have been a slow is demotivating start for them. These are all too often the students who we really need to engage and get on board from the moment they enter the room.

To further make the most of every moment in the room we have sought to use starters to combine skill practice with knowledge recall as the slides above demonstrate. It is a vitally important skill in English to be able to analyse quotations and explain what deeper information the words in the quote might tell you. 

Combining a quote to analyse as the starter with a retrieval grid gels the skill and the knowledge recall perfectly. The questions in the grid pushes them to recall knowledge which they can then use to help them annotate the quotation. A starter like this allows us to set up an English lesson as follows. The main focus will be a Language exam that centres upon analysing quotations from an extract.

Before we begin that content we recap Macbeth and analyse a Macbeth quote using the retrieval grid quote combination seen above. We have then, in the space of ten minutes recalled information about one topic, practiced a skill for that same topic (language analysis) and prepared students for the skill they will be using in the main focus of the lesson (language analysis again). It is a lovely way to make every moment count.

Interesting Further Reading regarding maximising the pace of lessons:

1. Teaching Walkthrus – Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli

2. Teach Like A Champion – Doug Lemov – also this interesting blog https://edcentral.uk/edblog/beginner-guides/a-beginners-guide-to-professor-doug-lemov-1

3. Rosenshine’s prinicples of instruction - https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Principles-of-Insruction-Rosenshine.pdf

4. An interesting blog by a head teacher of Batchwood School in St Albans - http://batchwood.herts.sch.uk/files/Injecting-Pace-into-lessons.pdf

Book Looks - Where are we now?

Throughout this term, many a discussion has focused on 'reviewing learning meaningfully to ensure all students are challenged to do their best'. One of the clearest indicators of how effective this has been is within students' books, as we strive to create a resource that is proficient for them to revise from and in addition shows a clear feedback loop between students and teachers. The concept of a 'learning diary' is one that has seen incremental improvements over the course of this term amongst the bulk of our student cohort, but unfortunately this is still partially lost on a small number. In this weeks blog post we explore examples of strategic approaches to raising expectations from a variety of departments to ensure students recognise teacher led book expectations. 

Let's remind ourselves, what should all books have?

As shown opposite in this excellent PE department example, all books should have:

1. Clear driving questions throughout, underlined with a ruler, showing evidence that students have been provided with the opportunity to respond and reflect on their learning.

2. Evidence that students are regularly exposed to Tier 3/ subject specific vocabulary - whether this be through the use of glossaries, guided reading, word banks or the expectation that students include specific words within their writing.

3. Be presented in a way that makes them readily accessible for retrieval work and for revision. In other words, that students are able to use them as a source of knowledge - no loose sheets, use of DIRT time to ensure classwork is complete. 

4. Contain Try Now tasks routinely and often (every 8 lessons of learning) to allow students to reflect on their work and challenge them to extend.

5. Corrections are made where necessary, with the use of green pen to provide peer or self feedback.

How have departments been maintaining these standards?

A unified approach to achieve some of these areas is necessary in order to jointly reinforce and support each other with these expectations across the school.

Use your Recognition Boards and Displays: Through the use of positive recognition, we can model the standard expected. Despite the need to socially distance from students, there is nothing preventing us from displaying to students how we wish for books to look. Classroom displays that contain student work with DQs underlined, key vocab used routinely and with student led corrections made can be a powerful tool. Referring back to said displays may be necessary frequently to begin with, but soon the routines and expectations will filter down to everyday classroom life. The Science department have displayed their recognition board in a prominent location, visible to all students who enter the D block, and thus developing a culture of peer led expectations presented through positive reinforcement. 

Sharing Best Practice: As mentioned in the previous blog on this topic, physical examples of other students' work is often the easiest and quickest solution. Keeping copies of books from previous years might not be an immediate solution, but if a colleague has delivered the same task/lesson at an earlier point to you and can share a strong example from their student cohort, physically sharing that book with your

class is a very quick win. One important point to note; try not to always select the student with the most beautiful handwriting, which is fatefully selecting style over substance. Instead consider an array of samples that show varying abilities but model what is expected; use of key vocab, DQs underlined, student led corrections in green etc.

Provide checklists to those students who require more support: A selection of departments are utilising the use of checklists shared at the starts of lessons, either on students' desks, embedded into PowerPoint's or on a post-it to remind the more forgetful students. Please see the example below from the English department:

Lesson start	Tick
Open the book to the next page or draw a line under the last lessons work.
Copy out the driving question.
Copy out the date.
Underline the driving question with a ruler.
Underline the date with a ruler.
Complete the DO NOW/Settling task.

Include DIRT time within your lessons: Within Humanities, DIRT time is routinely provided, often to accompany a Try Now task, to ensure students are provided with the appropriate opportunities to make their books 'fit for purpose'. There are a range of formats used from checklists (shown opposite) to playing TAG!! The process behind TAG is one of student/peer led feedback. Students must:

Tell their partner one aspect of their book that they admire.

Ask them a question on a piece of work they feel needs developing.

Give them a clear target to work that allows them to show pride in their work.

This format has only been used since September with a small cohort of students (Year 9 Geographers) but is showing promise after some clear training of students about 'constructive feedback'. Many of us at Mangotsfield have our own departmental or personal methods for raising expectations and ensuring pride in books is explicit, so please do share your top tips in the GC comments section.

Do we know what individual students 'best work' looks like?

On numerous occasions, I have queried whether a student is capable of presenting their work any neater? Whilst a particular pet-hate of mine is students who doodle or graffiti in the margin (surely my lessons are far too entertaining and challenging for them to have time to do that!), there are some students who clearly do work hard to present their work neatly but it might still fall below what I personally call neat. This juxtaposition would be much easier to interpret if we had an indication of what each individual student could truly produce and then this was used to hold them accountable. 

We are not saying that all books must be excessively neat, with immaculate handwriting as for some students this is setting them up to fail. What we are asking is that students are challenged to produce their best, through high expectations, and that books are giving status as a fundamentally vital resource to support student learning. 

Tiff Partridge has kindly shared some research from her previous visits to primary schools. As a result, the English department in the past have trialed an 'expectations' lesson, in which students are asked to produce a uniform piece of work. Whilst we recognise there are issues with asking some students to copy out work, as a singular activity, to ensure a benchmark of that students' standard is recognised, it has its merits. If you wish to have a look, please visit the following link and consider as a department discussing what you might ask of students if you were to create a 'benchmark task': https://drive.google.com/file/d/12DEsFFlkUzwDaYxYWpNq-Fsh05rNXCgY/view?usp=sharing

Book Looks - Defining Expectations and sharing a vision for learning

As we reaffirm our high expectations with students regarding our Mangotsfield Way core values, it is essential to set the bar high regarding the standard of classwork and most specifically books. This blog post is not simply about presentation - whilst much could be written about the importance of a neat and well presented book, there is a wider rationale for the focus on quality classwork. The main aim is to ensure that students recognise the shared vision that their books form a 'learning diary', in which they are regularly offered opportunities to record core knowledge, retrieve and apply said knowledge using a variety of strategies, have open channels of communication (feedback) with their teacher and peers and finally recognise their own path of progress.

But how can this be achieved?

First and foremost, it is about marrying the wider school expectations with individual subject routines. In other words, our whole school priorities must be universally applied but in a way that is sensitive to the needs of our individual subjects . It is agreed that ALL BOOKS should:

1. Have clear driving questions throughout, underlined with a ruler, showing evidence that students have been provided with the opportunity to respond and reflect on their learning.

2. Evidence that students are regularly exposed to Tier 3/ subject specific vocabulary - whether this be through the use of glossaries, guided reading, word banks or the expectation that students include specific words within their writing.

3. Be presented in a way that makes them readily accessible for retrieval work and for revision. In other words, that students are able to use them as a source of knowledge - no loose sheets, use of DIRT time to ensure classwork is complete. 

4. Try Now tasks routinely and often (every 8 lessons of learning) allow students to reflect on their work and challenge them to extend.

5. Corrections are made where necessary, with the use of green pen to provide peer or self feedback.

So these non-negotiables' aside, how do we model the standard that we expect from students? Our new recognition system is one approach - publicly recognising students whose classwork is either exemplary, or those who have made a concerted effort even if its not the neatest book in the class. 

Many departments have started work on displays that allow for longer term recognition - do we have an opportunity here to build into these our department expectations surrounding books? WOW walls are a possible strategy here (see the blog post from 2018 Mango Moments - WOW wall). However, is displaying the work enough? I recently read an excellent article on how creating classroom displays of students work only truly has an impact if you share with students why its exemplary. This may be through permanent annotations that form part of the display or through discussions directly with students. Is this enough to maintain day to day expectations though?

So how can we transfer this message to books?

One consideration is that presenting students with the 'ideal book' does not allow for much flexibility between departments. Therefore, should we as departments be providing students with our own autonomous versions, or a hybrid of the two? 

In primary schools, well my sons for certain, they provide all students with annotated examples of book expectations based on literacy and numeracy (see photo opposite). We often assume by secondary level that students should be well trained but often this is when we see standards drop. 

So how would this look in your department? Imagine you have been asked to select ONE students book to represent you as a teacher? What would it include? Why have you chosen this one? How many of us naturally select that of a HAP for example? 

We also need to ask ourselves the harder questions of what does a good book for a LAP look like? How can we ensure that missed work is included, especially in period of high absence. 

In some departments, electronic workbooks are an alternative approach and the use of Google Classrooms is essential here. The dialogue between teacher and student becomes a permanent record and amendments can be made through directed feedback. 

In other departments, its through structure DIRT time in which students receive a checklist of improvements to make. But the balance must be right, too much emphasis on presentation and not enough on content can render this process ineffective. 

Modelling is therefore the most common approach. Keeping examples of previous students work is a must, I have a cupboard full of GCSE books in particular that I can retrieve at any point with my current GCSE classes to demonstrate the quality of learning I wish to see. Creating a bank of images on our Google Drives is a more 'modern' approach and then embedding said examples into Google Slides becomes a breeze. Please see the growing bank of examples the Humanities Department has begun to collate for this very purpose: Book Presentation Google Drive.

Please consider as a department what are the essentials for your subject, in addition ensuring that the wider priorities of 'growing independent learners who take pride in their work' and 'embedding formative assessment to identify and close gaps' are evident throughout. 

Guided Reading - there's more to it then just decoding key words!

All new vocab is stored for approximately two seconds before it needs to be rehearsed to be retained. This leads to barriers if you wish to present to students a complex piece of text, containing an abundance of new vocabulary, unless you have a plan for how to tackle it. That is where guided reading comes in; "Guided reading is an instructional approach designed to help students build an effective system for processing increasingly challenging texts over time" (@MrHand_, Twitter 2020).

At primary level, it is done in small groups of students (4-6) and benefits from the learners being near the teacher. The readers then receive immediate feedback on their interpretations of the text and the students are primarily responsible for reading. At secondary level, it has evolved into whole class practice, through carefully structured tasks where the teacher focuses on vocabulary as well as extended text. To develop students confidence with vocabulary it is important to:

1. Ensure all key words are shared at the start of the lesson, and built on throughout the lesson with definitions, concrete examples and even challenges of 'what it is not'.

2. Complex words are broken into parts so their context or origin is discussed.

3. Retrieval activities and quizzes are regularly used, include concept mapping, to encourage students to revisit the vocabulary.

'Say it again, say it better' is an excellent tool to use in this scenario (https://my.chartered.college/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/8.-Say-It-Again-Better.pdf). In this example, students have to reframe answers to demonstrate their understanding of the vocabulary for the lesson to then progress. It can form a great hinge point in the lesson. It is also important to consider the 3 Tier Hierarchy of vocabulary when planning. Plan which words we need to teach. Which tier 2 and 3 words do students need to read, comprehend and remember? Which key words are intriguing? Which are important? Which are compulsory to the students making progress?

"Word rich students, come from word rich classrooms which are designed around word rich curriculums" (Alex Quigley, Closing the Vocabulary Gap). He argues that vocabulary is one of the most important factors in academic performance. This is why we at Mangotsfield have redesigned our curriculums to be knowledge rich and culturally broad, to allow those students who are 'word poor' to become 'word rich'. 

So what practical strategies can we explore? 

In Geography, we have designed our new KS3 curriculum to include more frequent opportunities for students to engage in intriguing non-fiction challenging texts. We are using a set format that allows the text to be the central focal point of the work, but 'guides' student through its content using specific questions, as shown below.

These are best printed on A3, to ensure students can truly focus on the text centralised. Most importantly, the directed questions go in order of the text and include an arrow that links to the specific section the question is asking for reflection on. This allows for students to avoid misconceptions or confusion over which part of the text they are exploring. 

In is also important to ensure that students engage with key words presented at the start of the lesson. Presenting students with the opportunity to record both important and impressive words, allows them to build their own word bank that can be referred back to at their own discretion during extended writing tasks. 

For fiction based texts, the Guided Reading spinner is an interesting approach to take. Whilst the questions appear fairly standard on the example opposite, they can be made more specific based on the chosen text and also randomly generated in class to provide a more spontaneous period of discussion (or with the use of a Kagan Structure such as All Stand Consensus or Numbered Heads Together). 

As always, if you are interested in any further reading can I recommend the following two blog posts:

1. https://www.theconfidentteacher.com/2018/10/more-than-just-word-walls/ A discussion by Alex Quigley on why its important to train teachers on how to deliver vocabulary.

2. https://learningspy.co.uk/literacy/closing-language-gap-building-vocabulary/ An interesting post by David Didau on the important of teaching to Tier 3 vocabulary and its importance in academic success.