My students don’t seem to have a desire to do any independent work. One student last week stated, ‘you’re going to go through the answers, aren’t you? I’ll wait until then’. As a teacher of a subject that is always centred around enquiry, this has been frustrating. In addition, when presented with assessments or homework that need to be completed independently, students appear deeply offended, as if I’ve told them that they need to write in ancient Greek.
Current literature suggests that many students need to be taught independence, particularly after the lockdowns, which seems counterintuitive. However, the EEF, in their 7-step model for independence, highlight the importance of explicit strategy instruction and guided practice for tasks we wish students to later tackle independently. I decided to experiment with two areas, homework and feedback, where I felt student independence could be encouraged/taught, giving them confidence that could hopefully be applied to in class learning (without causing massive amounts of work for me).
Across KS3 we have now introduced a consistent format consisting of three questions for events that we revisit in homework, ‘Why did it happen?’, ‘What was it?’, ‘What was the impact?’. Though very simple, explicit strategy instruction and modelling was required to teach students the new structure. We’ve also been giving whole class feedback, allowing students to reflect and add to their answers, hopefully building their confidence through understanding of expectations. Explicitly teaching a consistent structure for homework and allowing students time for reflection has increased the quality of student homework. QA completed in year 8 showed that 80% of students felt the structure helped them to revise content from year 7, so hopefully students can apply this strategy to their revision.
In the past, I’ve spent hours creating feedback resources and talking through each question on every assessment, only to bore higher ability students and to overwhelm students who had underperformed. Reading around independence and feedback has taught me that I was actually impeding student’s independent engagement with feedback as a result by teaching them to be overly reliant on me and also passive learners. The Great Teaching Toolkit suggests that feedback should be actionable, contribute to feelings of self-efficacy and include metacognitive strategies. Therefore, as a department, we have been trialling the use of centralised feedback videos.
The videos include model answers for each question, narration that encourages students to reflect on their approaches to the question, as well as their answers, and a google form to evaluate their revision. Students appear to engage better with feedback when they can choose which parts of the assessment they felt they struggled in, also encouraging metacognitive thinking. The google forms have additionally been really useful to see patterns within classes of the historical skills students find most challenging. Hopefully, continued use of the feedback videos will teach students to become more independent as they become better at identifying the areas they find most difficult, and will encourage them to focus their revision accordingly.
While both of these approaches are not novel, they are hopefully simplistic, accessible and research informed ways to teach further independence to students.
E Powell, History
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