I am a relative novice to being at the receiving end of edits, and it’s an interesting experience. The first time, I agreed with all but two of the suggested changes, as I could see that they improved the clarity of the text for anyone who wasn’t in my head. The two I didn’t like were both dialogue. When I suggested my own, more in-character improvements, they were agreed by the editor. The second time I was asked to do line edits I had a similar experience – the only change I didn’t like was to dialogue. The editor had corrected a character’s grammar. I thought about it hard. In the end, I decided that, if it wasn’t clear to the editor that the grammatical error was deliberate (to create the character’s voice), then it would also not be clear to other readers.
This morning I sat down to a set of completely uncontroversial line edits, almost all of which involved the addition of commas. This made me smile – I am of the ‘If you don’t need it, leave it out’ school of punctuation, but I enjoyed putting the commas in because it felt someone had read my story and cared enough about it to make some teeny improvements. And that’s why I like line edits. Being invited to tweak and polish feels like love.
In post-16 classes often start to sort of fade away as the exams approach, with some students on study leave and others just not bothering to turn up anymore. This always seems a shame, not only because the students really need to attend, but also because you don’t get a final lesson to conclusively say goodbye.
This year may well be my last as a full-time classroom teacher, at least for a while, so I determined to have a proper final lesson with at least two of my classes where I knew I could rely on a decent attendance: my Level 1 Functional English group and my GCSE re-sit group.
Kim’s Game spellings: Functional English
This activity took the last 20 minutes of their final lesson. Before that we’d done some DIRT tasks and a quick walk-through of a paper. All year I’ve been testing them on a list of common misspellings, and I wanted to finish with a spelling activity. I got the idea of using a variation on Kim’s Game from Julie Blake’s ‘The Full English’ published by NATE. It’s a very small class so I knew I could make it work.
The preparation for this was quite time-consuming and fiddly, but I made it more so than it had to be.
Resources:
A list of spellings cut up into labels. (I used 20 that I deemed most likely to be useful in the exam)
Sticky tape
A range of wrapped chocolates
A tray
A cloth to cover the tray
The students each need their rough workbook / some paper, pen, and a mini whiteboard.
Preparation
Cut out the spellings and stick each one onto a chocolate. The way I did this took a while because a) I got obsessed with sticking the labels so that the brand of chocolate was still visible and b) I tried to match the desirability of the chocolate to the difficulty of the spelling. If you did it with some laminated cards that you already had made for key terminology, or got an admin person to print the words out onto sticky labels for you, it would be a lot quicker. Then arrange the labelled chocolates onto a tray (I used the lid of a boot box) and cover it with a cloth.
The activity
The basic idea of Kim’s Game is that you uncover the tray for a few minutes, and then everyone has to try and write down as many things as they can. This is how my version worked:
- The students all gathered round the tray which I uncovered for them to memorise for 3 minutes. Then I re-covered the tray.
- The students then had 5 minutes to write down as many words as they could remember in their workbooks.
- As I had plenty of time, I gave them a further 2 minutes to come back and look, and then a few more minutes to write some more words down.
- I asked each student in turn to write a word on their mini whiteboard and hold it up. If it was on the tray and spelled correctly, they won the chocolate. I started with the weakest speller so it became more of a challenge as it went on, and everyone had a chance.
- Towards the end I gave some hints, and eventually said ‘First person to spell ‘x’ correctly wins it’ until everything was gone.
The students enjoyed this – it felt like a fun concluding activity but still purposeful becasue they were revising the spellings of useful vocabulary. It was easy to improvise and play it by ear because it was a small group – I’m not sure this would work so well with a large class.
Pass the parcel analysis: GCSE English
I came up with this as the whole-class conclusion to a final lesson that mostly consisted of a ‘circuit training’ activity, where tables were set up with different activities, students spending ten minutes on each one. I mostly used activities I already had made, but one which involved sticking terminology labels onto a blown-up text I re-named ‘Pin the term on the text’. This made me think about giving the whole lesson a party game theme. I didn’t end up doing that, but it did make me think up this pass-the-parcel activity.
Resources
A text for analysis, cut up into smallish sections. I use Mandela’s ‘Make Poverty History’ speech from theAQA non-fiction booklet.
The same number of wrapped chocolates as you have text sections.
Wrapping material. I used newspaper. It occurred to me long afterwards that I could have used the text itself as the wrapper, one bit printed onto the middle of each sheet.
Sticky tape
Music – there are ready-made pass-the-parcel videos on You Tube. I found one called ‘Hot Potato’ which sounded very suspenseful.
Preparation
Stick a chocolate to each text section, then wrap in reverse order, so that when unwrapped the text will be revealed in the correct order.
Arrange chairs in a circle, put the music on!
How to play
When the music stops, pause it to give time for the activity.
The student who’s holding the parcel unwraps it, and reads out the text segment. They then have to identify one technique or language feature being used, and that earns them the chocolate.
At the end, I asked the students who they thought might have made the speech, and they got it right on the third guess.
I allowed 15 minutes for this but 20 would have been better.
The class I did this with are an enthuiastic bunch and they went for it in a big way, heping each other out and policing the fairness themselves so that I could just sit back and manage the music. Again, it felt like we’d had a proper fun-but-purposeful conclusion to the year.
One tip for both the above: wrapped chocolates are the best bet, but have some vegan sweets in reserve for anyone with allergies. Vegan jelly-type sweets are the one thing no one has yet objected to in my experience. And on a hot day they’re also better to save for later for those who are fasting.
For the last two weeks I have not written a lesson plan. Not a five minute one or a two minute one.
I also haven’t filled in my planner (teacher diary) more than 2 weeks ahead.
I have updated my Moodle courses and other resources on a daily basis, but am no more than 3 lessons ahead with this, and for one class I am currently 2 lessons in arrears with Moodle.
It’s probably clear from that last clause that this is not a brave and innovative strategy. Normally my planner is completed at least half a term at a time, and my first half term’s lessons, especially for new classes, have properly written plans.
I did manage a quickly sketched plan – jotted down just before the lesson – for the first two weeks, but now even that seems beyond me.
If you’d asked me even last week, I might have claimed that lesson planning is my number one priority. I wouldn’t go home till it was done. But now life has crept up and surrounded me, so I have even less time than normal, I realise my actual priorities (work only – family goes without saying), as evidenced by my behaviour, are:
1. A conversation with a student, parent or colleague
2. Marking and report writing
3. Updating learning resources and Moodle courses
4. A whole bunch of contingencies I can’t classify
And lesson planning, other than as the thinking that connects 2 and 3, has just fallen off the list.
I just wish I had time properly to reflect on this discovery. Writing this blog again is the first step.
Fifteen years or so ago, if someone had asked me how I knew my students were making progress, I would have had a simple answer. I’d have produced my markbook, where homework and timed essays, mock exams etc would all be recorded. I could have complicated the issue by producing the sheets of paper on which were scribbled students’ targets for improvement, identified after each bout of marking – but really I thought the markbook ought to be enough.
These days it’s what’s written on those sheets of paper (and I still seem to need them) that matters to me most. The real issue is not whether I can see a nice progression of marks / grades on my tracking sheet, all traffic-lighted and smart. It’s whether the students know what it is they need to do to improve, to move up the mark bands, and whether they actaually put this into practice.
Recently I have implemented two very simple ideas, both of which were inspired by reading other teachers’ blogs.
1. Student self-assessment and target setting using the “ladder”
I turned the mark scheme for the AS English Language Mode question into a “ladder”. The assessment criteria for each band were re-worded as statements students could tick off to assess themselves. Alongside this ladder, I left a space where students could write their own targets for progression. They use this to check their own learning, to select differentiated tasks, and to give me feedback so I can plan the next run of lessons. It makes the progress visible to them and me and is having a very positive impact – not only on the students’ work, but also on their morale. They know they are progressing: they can see the steps taken and still to come.
This idea works well with this speciifcation and question, where there are separate marks for each AO and the criteria for each mark band are transparent and reasonably objective. Not all markschemes are equally amenable to this treatment.
2. Giving the students “actions” in their feedback instead of targets for improvement
At the end of my written feedback for the AS English Lang and Lit students, instead of giving them a target to improve next time, I have started giving them actions that they must carry out in the lesson as soon as they get the essay back. This often involves re-writing a section of the essay, or adding to it. From what I can see so far, this is having a positive impact on most of the group, who can see what improvement looks like within one lesson.
My next step is to try and combine these two approaches.
I still often stick my markbook under their noses though: “Look, you’ve gone from a D to a B this term!” has a certain power.
This was my first blog for blogsync.
A few weeks ago my department resolved to take our own advice. Often, when giving students feedback on their analytical essays, we say “Cover fewer things, in more depth”. And slowly it has dawned on us that this is also what we, as teachers, need to do.
Part of the catalyst for this – a rather slow-burning catalyst – was my observing several lessons where the writing task planned for the end of the lesson was severely curtailed or cancelled. These were otherwise very good lessons, and if I hadn’t been given the lesson plan in advance, I might not even have realised something had ‘gone wrong’ with the pacing. Each lesson was different, but had this one thing in common: too many activities had been planned.
In one of these lessons, the teacher was enabling the students to analyse a very tricky poem with skillfully structured activities. He was also showing considerable expertise in shaping a cohesive, confortable group out of a tricky bunch of individuals. He made good use of thinking time, deployed praise adroitly, manipulated pairings deftly. Then the feedback discussion took too long and he had to set the writing task as homework.
Shame. Only, that isn’t what happened. That’s only what happened if you treat the lesson plan as something that must not be deviated from. What really happened was that an experienced teacher found a discussion going really well, saw an opportunity to stimulate some deeper thinking while building up the fragile confidence of some of his students, and went for it. Even though he was being observed.
Fantastic. A teacher doing what’s best for the learning of his class at that moment, rather than what’s going to look “in control” to an observer. And the funny thing is, the students had done some writing anyway, because this was one of the strategies the teacher used to increase their confidence to participate in the discussion. But this teacher had at one time in his past had a set structure for a lesson drummed into him, whcih included a compulsory written outcome at the end, so he felt he had failed by not including it.
By unpicking the belief that a lesson has to contain certain elements in order to be any good, we came to the conclusion that it ought to be OK to focus on just one thing per lesson. Yes, there will be a bit of all four skills in every lesson, but it is fine – more than fine, preferable – to focus your objective and outcome on one. So in one lesson our focus will be on reading and analysis, with good annotations the outcome. In the next, we will focus on building up alternative interpretations, with either a spoken or written presentation of those as the outcome. In a third, the focus could be on writing more analytically, with a big chunk of lesson time spent writing and then peer reviewing.
We know it’s possibly a risky approach, but we also believe it’s the right one for our students.
This will be my last post on group work, as I have moved this term to experimenting with peer review and self-assessment.
Since I stopped experimenting, I have found myself using pair-square as a default. This is partly, at least, out of laziness, as it avoids the need to move tables around, but it is also a response to the intractability of some of the problems outlined below.
This last post will briefly outline the on-going difficulties I’ve encountered in making groups work, and the solutions that have worked for me.
1. Passengers
As soon as your group size goes to three, this can become a problem.Even if the participants know they have to report back, it is possible for one person to just note down others’ ideas. Better than not doing anything, but they’re still not benefitting from the process fully. This is why accountability is only a partial solution. The two strategies that have worked here for me are:changing groupings from lesson to lesson, and insisting on hearing what an habitual passenger has to say on the topic when I reach that group. Neither of these totally solve the problem, though.
2. Going off task
One of the reasons my students love group work is also the main reason it can go horribly wrong – it’s sociable. Some of them will always start talking about where they got their hair extensions done instead of the task. On the whole good classroom management is the key. If the outcome is clear, there is a reasonable time limit, and the teacher monitors the groups, this won’t get too bad. Asking “How does the quality of your weave relate to the poem?” usually does the job. Apart from this, I’ve found appointing someone to chair the discussion is pretty much essential with groups of more than 4.
Sometimes groups go off task for a good reason – for example when discussing a text leads to a sharing of relevant personal experiences; you need to acknowledge that this hasvalue and give it some space, even if it messes up your timings.
3. Sharing by copying
Although this is easily stopped, I often see it when I observe lessons. A great activity such as home/expert, jigsaw groups, reciprocal teaching or marketplace is set up, then when it comes to the stage where individuals report back to their groups / re-teach, they just put their worksheet/notes on the desk and the others copy them. At least half the benefit of the activity – the reformulation – is lost. Solution? Don’t give out the worksheet to be completed until the final home group stage. Make it a rule that you are not allowed to show the rest of the group your notes. (Sometimes in marketplace I’ve seen the experts reading highlighted chunks of their source materials out and totally ignoring their beautiful visual notes. Why didn’t the teacher take the source materials away?)
4. Groups finishing too quickly
This tends to happen in the final stage of re-group activities. (It can be due to problem 3.) All the groups but one are still discussing enthusiastically and one has ground to a halt. You check, and they have completed the task. What do you do? Give them an extension task? This can work, especially if they can then share this with the rest of the class. Get them to put their findings up on the board/wall to act as the starting point for the plenary. Ask them to prepare questions for the plenary. Ignore them, in the hope that boredom will lead them to discuss the topic a bit further? It’s more likely they will start checking their timelines and comparing hairdressers again. Ask someone in the group who you suspect of passengerdom to explain the group’s findings to you?
Make a note of who was in this group and don’t put them together again for a while. Consider whether the activity would have gone better if they’d been in mixed/differentiated/random/friendship groups.
This week I got my GCSE class to play “Just a minute” in groups using their CA topics. The majority of the class were soon laughing, shouting “Hesitation!” at each other and having a great time. One group, when I got to them, informed me that two of them had spoken for 60 seconds without being interrupted. The LSA and I listened to them and immediately spotted hesitation and repetition, but as soon as I moved away they stopped playing properly again. There was just something wrong with the chemistry in that group – they didn’t enjoy challenging each other, and I won’t put them together again if I can help it. The same class had played “Room 101”, in different groups, with great success, the week before.
Sometimes the success of group work is down to the mysterious chemistry of individuals in combination, and manipulating this is what makes it so endlessly fascinating to me.
Last week I tried to use peer review with every class at least once to refine the process. Here are the results.
Lesson 1
My main learning objective with this class recently has been to be able to identify detailed word classes, and we have just moved on to being able to write about the effect. In the previous lessons the students had written two sentences after analysing the text:, one identifying and describing a point about one word class, and the second elaborating how this linked to the writer’s purpose. In this lesson they carried out a similar analysis exercise in pairs at the start, which they were now able to do a bit faster and more independently. They then decided what the criteria for a good analytical paragraph would be – as a whole class discussion – and I wrote these on a WB. Each pair was then given a sheet of A3 on which to write their paragraph. I encouraged them to do a draft in their notebooks first. They swapped paragraphs with another pair who marked it, correcting errors, then wrote WWW/EBI comments. Finally pairs used the feedback to re-draft their paragraphs.
This worked well in terms of focusing the students’ attention on the need to be able to write clearly and succinctly about what they had identified. For some of them, the main learning was the importance of choosing the right example to write up.
Lesson 2
This class are smaller and very cohesive, so with them I tried a slightly different approach. After following exactly the same procedure for setting up the writing – an analysis task, decide criteria collectively, write on A3 sheets – I got them to do a more public gallery-style critique. They left their paragraphs and their annotated texts on their tables and circulated around the room in what I called a “speed-dating-carousel-peer-marking” process. One pair got several comments on their choice of terminology, while another got a lot of criticism of the scribe’s handwriting! This all took lots of time and I decided to set the re-drafting as a homework task rather than rush it at the end. The drawback to this is that not all students completed the homework.
Lesson 3
Another fairly small and cohesive class. We did almost exactly the same as for Lesson 2. The main difference was that we broke the exam question up into mini tasks and they each wrote the appropriate part of the answer. The gallery critiquing section went to time and they were able to re-draft. This group gave each other more consistently useful feedback – they are an A2 group and more experienced. I plan to do this again in another lesson and put the sections together after the re-drafting to then spend some time on linking the sections together.
Lesson 4
This time I used the Bulls eye target approach. (See http://deadshelley.edublogs.org/2013/02/03/peer-review-aiming-for-the-bulls-eye/). After an initial analysis of a text, focused on answering a specific question about language, we had a quick snowball discussion to narrow down the most useful features to comment on. I then gave the students the mark scheme, told them to focus on the top band criteria and pick out five success criteria for this task. I instructed them to put the criteria in thier own words, but some of them just copied, so I need to work on a way of avoiding this, perhaps taking the scheme away again before they write. They then wrote their paragraphs individually. After swapping, they used the bullseye target diagram to plot how well their partner had met each criterion. When they got their work back, the students tweaked their paragraphs as necessary to improve their performance on their weakest criterion. This approach undoubtedly worked the best. The students liked the visual representation of their achievement on each SC and felt it helped them. They want to use it again and I do too – with the refinement in how we handle using the exam board criteria as a starting point. I need to do an activity with them first that will make them engage with the criteria and put them in their own words, or I can’t be sure they understand them. And if they don’t really understand them then their peer marking won’t be useful.
1. Trying to do a whole class critique of three paragraphs on IWB.
Students lost focus after two sentences. Gallery approach works much better.
2. Randomly assigning tasks to pairs, when some of them were more difficult than others.
One pair ended up with a task they weren’t ready to attempt. After the lesson I had no idea why I’d done this.
3. Asking students to come up with questions to ask me without giving them post-its to write them on.
This was sheer laziness – I had forgotten the post-its and thought I could get away with it. Ended up so off on a tangent it was comical.
Resolutions:
1. Never try to do whole class critique, at least not in the lesson before lunch, of more than two sentences. Swap with another pair instead or use gallery approach.
2. Assign the tasks purposefully, not randomly, or allow students to choose using SOLO.
3. Go back for the post its.
Great thinking on group work.
After experimenting for nearly a term and a half, I think it’s time to publish some conclusions. This is what works best for me, my students and my subject matter.
1.Reciprocal teachingThis means my favourite group and re-group method, but in the form of the “home – expert groups” approach. In the first phase students work individually, and / or in pairs or threes, to develop their understanding of the topic/text. Each pair/three has a different topic/text/approach. In the second phase the students are re-mixed and teach each other what they have learned.
Why does this work? Knowing they have responsibility to their final group pretty much sorts out the potential “passengers”. Because the students have to co-construct and then re-formulate the subject matter, they get a deeper understanding of it.And the students tend to like it, because it feels sociable, and over time they get to work with and know everyone else in the class.
Diasadvantages? It can be difficult to get the timing right. Especially in the final stage, some groups always seem to finish earlier than others. My solution to this is to have a further re-formulation activity up my sleeve for groups that finish faster.they can then report back on this task to the whole class(or it might involve starting off a display). A solution I haven’t tried yet is to tell them there will be a test at the end, so they will use any extra time to go over the material and revise rather than chatting.
2. Snowballing A variation of think – pair- share, this isn’t necessarily separate from the first technique.You pose the questions / set the task, and each student has to have a go at it, write down what they think etc. Then they pair up (could be just the person they are already sitting next to) to compare notes. When they’ve agreed (or agreed to disagree) they join up with another pair. If the task is suitable (e.g. narrowing down a list of questions to ask or things to look up) you can carry on to form groups of 8 before going whole class.If the task is about reaching a consensus or collecting examples, you probably have to stop at 4.
Why does this work? By sharing what they already know and could work out for themselves, the students get a strong feeling of independence and autonomy. The teacher can then focus on dealing with what they didn’t already know or need more guidance with.
Disadvantages? Can get stale if students do it a lot with the same pairs and groups every time. One good idea is to make the students change where they’re sitting before it starts.
3.. Cocktail partyCan have the same result as snowballing. After students have come up with an idea individually or in pairs, they are then told to mill around and see what everyone else got – or to talk to a minimum number of other students, see if they can find four others who agree wih them, or two people who got a completely different answer and so on.
Why does this work? For the same reasons of snowballing, with the added bonus that they get to move completely freely round the room and talk to lots of others, so it’s nice icebreaker, and a nice break from sitting.
Disadvantages? Could descend into complete mayhem, I suppose. I usually get unreasonably irritated with the handful of students who sit still and wait for everyone to come to them.You need to tell them what the signal to stop is or tell them to sit back down when they’ve spoken to the set number of poeple.
4. GalleryWhen students have finished their outcome – e.g. co-scribed essay, poster, powerpoint presentation, revision sheet – it is displayed on the wall, on PC or on their desks. Everyone then wanders round looking at everyone else’s work. They may do this with the notebooks or worksheets in hand, looking to supplement their own ideas, or with post-its for offering a critique.
Why does it work? The learning activity feels properly rounded off. Everyone has learned from everyone else.
Disadvantages? Some students don’t really take looking at others’ work that seriouslyif left completley free. Making it a bit more like speed dating works with these, as does making sure they have to comment on everything.
General tips for making group work work.
1. Plan your initial pairs or threes in advance for reciprocal teaching. It works best if you pair up students who are not at the same stage in their learning for the topic / type of activity you want them to do.
2. Have cards with students’ names on them (you can also use the lolly sticks you use for questioning, or students’ books) so you can quickly allocate tables to new groups of people in advance.
3. Have cards with letter and number combinations on them (and different colours too helps) You can give these out randomly or deliberately (or deliberately but pretending it’s random) as students enter.
4. Get students to move and work with others in the very first lesson of term, and after that at least once a week so they never get the idea that they have a fixed seat that they somehow hvae a right to stop in.
5. Allow students to use their phones/tablets to look stuff up (if they don’t have to ask you for factual info, they get more used to the idea of trying to do it all independently)
6. Take away handouts before the re-formulation phase, so they can’t just read out or shove the notes in front of the others for copying. Force them to re-state what they learned out loud.
7. Make sure students know how long they have to do the task (I’m surprised how often I forget to do this).Tell them what time it will be when they have to finish, or display a timer on the IWB.
8. Make sure the students know that they will have to do something with the information they are learning / text they are analysing later (this would probably be in your LO).
9. Deal with whole groups that go off task quickly but kindly – ask them how they got onto this seemingly irrelevant topic. Make one student then in charge of keeping the the group on task.
10. Occasionally make the groups genuinely random, or allow the students to choose their own partners / groups.
taviaallan 