Giving useful feedback to subject teams is a tricky part of whole-school secondary leadership. Here is an explanation of one way we try to get that right at Durrington.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
This blog is going to be printed, distributed and referenced an awful lot in the coming months and years. A great reference point for how we respond to the needs of pupils who need us most.
Giving useful feedback to subject teams is a tricky part of whole-school secondary leadership. Here is an explanation of one way we try to get that right at Durrington.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
Leading teaching and learning in a large secondary school is a great job. One of its many complexities, however, is that subject pedagogy is not universal, in fact, it is extremely different. That means the people you are leading, in the shape of subject leaders (or curriculum leaders as we call them), have greater expertise in their subject’s pedagogy than you do.
Why have someone like me leading teaching and learning then? Why not just allow curriculum leaders full autonomy and leave them to it? Well, that’s certainly an option, and not to do myself and my team out of a job, but in part I could see the attraction.
(Its also worth saying that the “me” in this blog is very much a royal “me” in that I have a small team that supports me in leading T&L here. That is one of the many benefits of being a research school.)
But, as I said, it is a great job and in my opinion does have value. If I’m doing it well, my role should be useful to curriculum leaders (and teachers) in a number of ways. Some (not exhaustive) would be:
Support in interpreting evidence-informed approaches to teaching and learning in a subject specific way.
Creating and maintaining a “tight but loose” framework for effective teaching that is meaningful for all and creates a common language across the school to talk about teaching.
Creating and sustaining structures for effective subject specific professional development.
Supporting the embedding of student routines that allow subject pedagogy to flourish.
A macro example of this would be designing a professional development structure that is consistent over a number a years that allows subject leaders to lead activity that helps their teams get better at specific teaching practices in their subjects. The micro would be helping a curriculum leader interpret metacognition in a way that supports the teaching of a specific chunk of their year 9 curriculum.
One aspect I’ve been really working at over the past couple of years is how I can give our curriculum leaders, and by proxy their teams, useful, meaningful and crucially formative feedback on the priorities they are working on.
There is more than one way to do that, and rather than document all of those I use, I just want to focus on one, what we call our T&L reviews. If I started again, I’d probably change the name as I don’t think it really describes what they are. However, I’m kind of stuck with them for at least this year because of all the laminated versions of the structure below up on office walls.
Essentially, T&L reviews are an opportunity for subject teams to get some feedback on where they are with their current priorities. As you can see, everything in our structure stems from the DIPs (department improvement plans). These are very pared down from the huge documents they used to be and are concise articulations of what teams are working on that term in four key areas: curriculum, teaching, assessment and routines & relationships. Our curriculum leaders together with their line managers write brilliant DIPs. I’m really proud of them. I say it all the time but at the start of each term when I read them all I’m blown away by the expertise they contain and how skillfully our curriculum leaders contextualise evidence-informed practice into something so subject specific, relevant and actionable. For example here is the “teaching” section of the current English DIP:
As you can see, they are not long. We aim for just a few bullet points per section. They are also a movable feast. The third bullet point is clearly a work-in-progress. In fact, in this case I know that these strategies have now been identified and are being worked on. The point is, the DIP is not for show, it is a genuine articulation of what leaders want to work on with their teams.
Therefore, the basic premise of the T&L reviews is that they provide useful feedback tied very closely to the DIP. They are not me and my team coming into the department and then deciding what their priorities are for them. This would completely undermine the DIP. They are also not about judging teacher effectiveness or department effectiveness, no summative judgement of any sort is made.
What they are designed to give is formative feedback against DIP priorities. Basically: “You want to develop in this area. We saw these aspects of that going really well (here are some examples), we think that you might have further still to go in these areas (here are some examples).“
We spend time before hand talking to the team and the leaders about the DIP and how aspects are going. We then spend lots of time in lessons having jointly decided on the best day to visit (we stress the importance of business as usual and given how many lessons I’m in across our school I can say we get it). We talk to the children, we look in books and we provide written feedback connected to each of the DIP’s bullet points. We then have a feedback meeting to discuss it all. If any teachers want more detailed individual feedback on lessons then we do that too. This is a collaborative process from start to finish and is about something that is a joint effort rather than something that is being “done to” the department.
So far, the feedback on them from curriculum leaders has been very good. Of course, the ideal would be to solely have specialists doing this for each subject. That’s not possible so we have to accept there is a limit to the feedback we can give. However, all curriculum leaders have said they have been able to use the feedback to help shape the professional development that has followed.
What’s been particularly heartening for me is to see how the reviews have influenced the DIPs that have followed and the teaching practice that I see in classrooms.
I’m not suggesting T&L reviews are the panacea for feedback at a department level, and try as I might I have been unable to completely remove the anxiety they create for staff being observed. However, I do think they have been valuable in reinforcing the importance of the DIP and as such supporting on-going subject specific professional development for Durrington teachers.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
We were lucky enough to have John Tomsett visit last week to talk about SEND and he referenced Ben an awful lot. Here is a bit of an opus on inclusive classrooms that I think we will be referencing for a long time to come.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
A typically useful and precise blog from Alex, this time on feedback and how we can incorporate it most effectively with metacognition and self-regulation.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
Tackling explicit vocabulary instruction has been a difficult thing for me to grasp in science. Often, especially as a physicist, my teaching practice leans towards calculations and concepts. Due to the relationship between my discipline and the real world, I often call upon my own schemas and experience to better relate my understanding of a concept to a student. Take the concept of kinetic energy – the energy stored in moving objects. Students typically understand well that moving things, like cars and people, have an energy store when they move. They know that energy gets converted when they run because they get warm. But in the few sentences I’ve used to give my example, while the concept of kinetic may help students make the link, I’ve used the word energy a handful of times without truly explaining what it is.
One of the problems with teaching vocabulary in science is that some scientific words have everyday meanings as well as scientific meanings. Take the word weight for example, in science weight is “the force of gravity, acting on an objects mass” whereas in everyday English we refer to weight as how much substance an object is made of. We talk about how much we “weigh” and “losing weight” which from a scientific point of view is referring to an objects mass as a physical property. When teaching vocabulary in science care has to be taken to not unlearn the everyday term, but also to be able to distinguish the difference and the context surrounding the two different types of definition.
Our approach has started with trying to identify words that may cause this confusion. Words like force, plastic, tissue. These words have very specific definitions within science, but also bring a particular image in students’ minds that may be completely different. Some words may have particularly confusing definitions. Students often use the word dissolve interchangeably with the idea of melting. By trying to identify and centralise a definition with these kinds of words we can stop and address the words as they appear in our curriculum.
Another issue with teaching science is that the three subjects within its discipline itself can also have different definitions regarding the context. Taking the term resolution. In biology we use the context of resolution in microscopes “the ability to distinguish between two separate objects”. However, in science we also talk about the resolution of equipment being its “smallest scale value”. By putting these concepts together, we can also start to talk about them within the context of their use.
One approach I’ve started to use, inspired by my colleague Dr Kyle, is to use new words in sentences that make sense semantically, but would not traditionally be used in that context. For example, the word synthesiser: “to make”. While it might be correct in a particularly scenario to ask someone to synthesise them a sandwich, it’s not a term we would use in that context. Similarly with the aforementioned term resolution, students often understand resolution in terms of picture quality on their various screens, which is more akin to the biology definition of the term rather than its ability to measure smaller values. By explicitly drawing attention to the nuances of language, we help students apply and contextualise words into their everyday use and help override any pre-existing ideas that may hinder their embedding.
Another approach has been developed is to use the etymology of words. This can help pupils identify patterns and develop their scientific understanding – for example, knowing that the word root chlor means green, will help them understand that chloroplasts in the plant cells, are where chlorophyll is contained- the pigment that causes plants to be green. So, time has been spent in various SPDS trying to identify the root words contained within our core vocabulary. Supported by various displays within classrooms and corridors with these root words to help increase exposure to them.
Overall our approach has come along way from “oh this word means…” and armed with these other tools such as modelling pronunciation, non-examples and other work done by Andy Tharby in our previous INSET, science is slowly starting to become more equipped to deal with the linguistic pressures to help our students become more articulate and word conscious individuals.
Fahim Rahman is a science teacher at Durrington High School. He is also a Research School associate for Durrington Research School
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
As usual what’s in my head informs my BOTW choice. I enjoyed this from Tom, challenging us leading teachers to think about how we find the balance between useful routines and allowing personalities to shine.
Durrington Professional Development Twilights 2023 – 24
This year we are offering twilight training programmes on the following areas of evidence-informed practice. They will take the format of three 90 minute online sessions spread over 6 – 8 weeks. You can book via this form.
How are your New Year resolutions going? Teachers have the advantage of having two bites at the resolution cherry: one when the academic year starts in September and one when the calendar year starts in January. So, if your September resolutions didn’t stick (was a better work/life balance mentioned?), then there is still time.
Every curriculum leader at Durrington High School, along with their SLT line manager, is expected to define their Departmental Improvement Priorities for the coming year. These priorities then form part of our line management meeting notes. This ensures, along with other mechanisms, that they are kept live and progress against them is constantly reviewed.
One of the MFL priorities this year is the perennially thorny problem of homework. Parents and teachers generally (but not universally) agree that it is a good thing and the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that it has high impact for low cost at secondary school, but the issue is how to implement a homework approach which delivers valuable learning and feedback for the students, while avoiding teachers struggling in and out of school with piles of books to mark every day: I have been there and I am not going back!
Post-COVID we moved to an on-line KS3 homework model with a combination of flashcard-based vocabulary learning and other self-marking exercises. This was great for photocopying costs and our workload: click a button, import the marks, praise the students who did well and set detentions for anyone who hadn’t completed the homework. However, despite the fact that we had the ability to interrogate the results to find out what students struggled with, in reality we rarely found the time to do so. The quality of the homework was also patchy: all the questions were multiple choice and there was a fair amount of guesswork going on: it was difficult to separate misconceptions from laziness. Finally, without an explicit link in lessons, the homework seemed separate from rather than integral to the students’ in-class learning.
Towards the end of the summer term, we had a team discussion about how to change our homework approach. I must admit that I needed a bit of convincing to go back to a paper-based model. The old one, which I had inherited on joining as MFL Curriculum Leader, did not work: it was based on providing spaced practice of previous topics which meant that there was little scaffolding or support for weaker learners. While we had identified the need for students to undertaken more independent writing practice, the Google Translate horrors from online learning during COVID were still too fresh in my mind for me to agree to the inclusion of writing tasks without some hesitation.
After our discussion, I created a sample homework task, which we agreed to use as a model. Everyone in the team has responsibility for a particular language and year group, so we all create the homework for our planning area. The tasks follow a similar 2-page format across KS3: a list of vocabulary to be learnt (including space to add some extra independently-researched vocabulary), with a link on an online flashcard set (also provided electronically when we set the homework on our on-line platform), a reading or listening exercise, 5 sentences to translate into the target language and 2 written questions to answer in the target language, the second is labelled a challenge question, but nearly everyone completes it. The vocabulary and tasks relate directly to the content of the students’ lessons. We use a sentence builder approach, so these (again provided electronically) provide a useful source of support for weaker students.
As with any change, implementation is key. Most students who were used to the on-line homework seemed to prefer paper-based homework: if I have a sheet in my pocket, it means that I have homework to do! Initially, we spent a fair amount of time going through the homework when we set it to ensure students understood what to do, although this time has now reduced as students are used to the format.
The routine for collecting and marking homework is crucial. We all trialled this before discussing and agreeing the following:
When homework is due, students are asked to put their homework sheet face down on the desk in front of them at the start of the lesson and reminded to write their name on the sheet.
The silent ‘do now’ task involves recalling the homework vocabulary from memory and while students complete this, the teacher circulates, checks that homework is complete and discusses any missing homework etc. with the students individually.
The students then self-mark the reading/listening exercises and translated sentences, ideally using a different colour pen to make corrections. They do this from a prepared answer PowerPoint.
The teacher then collects in the homework to mark the written paragraphs.
The following lesson starts with an error correction ‘do now’ task, based on the common errors made in the homework. The teacher will then use the marking of these to discuss misconceptions. After that, the teacher will share 2 – 3 good examples of the written task and elicit from the students why they have been chosen. I don’t put student names on these, but the person whose work I have chosen is easy to spot: they are the ones with big smiles on their faces! The corrected homework is then returned to all students.
There are imperfections in this system, but the good outweighs the bad. It relies on accurate self-marking by students: I usually have a quick scan too. However, if students mark their own work, they will at least hopefully consider why they made the error. If a teacher marks it, it can be put away without a glance. As a teacher, you need to be quite disciplined about doing your part of the marking or it can quickly build up (but at least if you need to take the work home, it is a pile of sheets rather than a box of books). Yes, we do get a bit of Google Translate, but much less frequently than I thought. It is really gratifying to see students taking time to give their own opinions, rather than being over-reliant on the language in their sentence builders (that is another story… or rather potential blog). I had an epic fail trying to elicit why I liked a certain piece of homework when a student suggested it was because the person ‘had used Google Translate for the whole thing’! The answer I was looking for was that they had used their sentence builder and then added their own ideas too. The student whose work was maligned even stayed after the lesson to assure me that he hadn’t just used Google Translate!
There are ways we could exploit the feedback phase further by training students to peer mark (always quite tricky in MFL) and by getting students to improve their written work, so I am not claiming to have implemented a perfect system. If pushed, I would say that there is still a little gap in the feedback loop, but a much smaller one. The big win is implementing a positive change with little impact on workload, so perhaps I might keep one resolution after all …
By Kate Cooper – Curriculum Leader for MFL at Durrington High School
Class Teaching 