As part of my role in the Ped Team I am working my way through the ‘Great Teaching Tool Kit’. Now, I approached this with a degree of scepticism (the first document is 72 pages long and I have an extremely short attention span….). However, I have to admit that it raises some interesting points on teaching and learning. Most recently I’ve been looking at ‘Structure’.
The Great Teaching Tool Kit has this to say;
‘Great teachers share learning aims with their students in ways that help students to understand what success looks like. This does not mean simply writing out lesson objectives or (worse still) getting students to copy them down. Abstract statements of learning aims may be useful but are certainly not enough. To specify learning aims properly, teachers also need to have examples of the kinds of problems, tasks and questions learners will be able to do, as well as examples of work that demonstrates them, with a clear story about how and why each piece of work meets each aim. Great teachers also help students to understand why a particular activity is taking place and how current learning fits into a wider structure. They draw attention to key ideas and signal transitions between activities that focus on different parts of the journey.’
Now this really resonated with me, not least as my subject is visual, so showing students how to do things is REALLY, REALLY EASY. But if we don’t SHOW them, and instead TELL them, it’s a whole different story. So, for me and other practical and visual subjects ‘to specify learning aims properly’ means that we ditch the talking and we move to other ways of showing students what their outcomes should LOOK like. This can take the form of live demo’s, flipped learning (where the demo is filmed), PowerPoints where we have examples of students work (note; not pieces we have created but ones their peers have). We use these visual examples to scaffold students through the course. Once they can SEE what they need to do, the whole learning thing becomes so much easier for them. There are very few grey areas when the answer is sitting right in front of you. So, in our department we absolutely have ‘examples of the kinds of problems, tasks and questions learners will be able to do, as well as examples of work that demonstrates them.’
I appreciate this is all a bit ‘blowie, ownie, trumptie’ but you know what, I’m 23 years into this profession and I’m only now starting to really nail it – and on structure I feel like I’m starting to generate resources that help, and I mean REALLY help our students. But getting to the stage where I have a department that is spilling over with high quality resources has taken a great deal of time. Lockdown helped in this respect – possibly one of the only good things to come out of that horrendous period of time. My wonderful team have diligently saved everything they created into shared folders and I have organised into the relevant schemes of work, PowerPoints, PLC’s (Personalised Learning Checklists), etc. I feel immense pride when I look at what we have done as a team and how none of it would be possible if we didn’t all work together. We have schemes of work with links to additional resources all designed to visually scaffold the students. And guess what? Outcomes improved a thousand times over, literally overnight. It is one of my most favourite parts of teaching, in fact it is teaching – finding the ways to make the penny drop because when you see it happening with students, it feels great and I truly believe that high quality structure and scaffolding and the key so those wonderful, money can’t buy, penny dropping moments.
Francesca, Art
Heathfield Teach Share Blog 