Just a quick one this one. Time is as usual slipping away, but I think I can just squeeze in a blog about something that is on my mind today.
I’ve been delivering a lot of training recently both through my role as Director of Durrington Research School and with our curriculum leaders here at Durrington High School around the EEF’s Effective Professional Development guidance report. This has meant lots of time thinking about and discussing the 14 mechanisms for professional development it contains.
The one that is occupying my grey matter this afternoon is number 11: providing prompts and cues. Here is the section of the guidance report that explains it:
We’ve got a small number of teaching and learning priorities at Durrington this year, and questioning is chief amongst them. Lots of work is going on, and lots of it brilliant, but I’ve been considering how I can best provide those timely reminders that are so important in the tricky world of adult behaviour change. Questioning is so embedded in our practice as teachers that it is very tough to break what are deeply engrained habits.
One method I’m using are a couple of posters for teacher’s classrooms.
Health warning time. As (I think I’m attributing this correctly) Mary Myatt once said:
So, at worst these posters could be just that. Wallpaper. What is important is the training that has gone with them and the explanation of the messages they contain. Without that, they are not a prompt they are messages ripe for being ignored, misunderstood or paid lip service to. However, add the INSET sessions, the meetings with curriculum leaders, the corridor conversations, the drop-in observation feedback and the affirmation of where teachers have got these things right, and then they might just be useful.
As I said behaviour change is really difficult, even when we are sold on something and believe it is worthwhile. These posters then help nudge us towards those behaviours. Useful stuff, but only as part of a much wider package.
To the posters then. The first are for metacognitive questioning and look like this:
These are up already in most of our classrooms. Even better, they have been contextualised to the subject so they are now different in maths classrooms compared to English ones.
Going up next week are these posters from Inner Drive:
This is because as well as metacognitive questions we are also focused on improving think and participation ratio in questioning. I used this poster in our whole staff INSET, unpicking each part and giving multiple examples for each. Now is a good time to reinforce that message with the physical posters as a reminder.
Ultimately then prompts and cues are only any good when they are part of a much bigger picture, but when we are looking to break habits, they are an important part of it.
By Chris Runeckles
Class Teaching 