Science – a curriculum giveaway

For those of you who don’t want to read the blather (though I think it might well be useful) and just want the curriculum document, scroll down to the arrow to find a Dropbox link.

The document linked below is the result of 25+ hours of work. It is 41 pages and 15115 words long. I share it in the hope that it might be useful to others. I bang on a lot about how excessive workload is undermining the profession, so I hope that sharing this curriculum document counts as an example of me putting my money where my mouth is. (I created it in my own time, and have taken only a limited payment from my school for the work done on the proviso that I can distribute it as I see fit. They kindly acquiesced.)

What I have attempted to do is to spell out in detail the knowledge to be taught, including the necessary vocabulary, for each science topic from year 1 to year 6. In addition, for each topic the relevant prior knowledge and vocabulary – gathered from previously taught topics – is listed. For example, the electrical circuits topic in year 6 has plenty of new knowledge and vocabulary to be taught, but much of the learning has already been covered in the year 4 unit on electricity (and in other topics). Here is the knowledge and vocabulary to be revised in the year 6 electricity topic:

In comparison, the new knowledge and vocabulary to be taught is less extensive:

Seeing the intended curriculum in this way serves a few purposes: most obviously, it links each topic to the rest of the science curriculum, but it also emphasises to teachers how much a given topic relies on previous learning (while not making the teachers search for this information).* Of course, this document is only intended to specify the ‘what’ of the science curriculum. As such, it is a relatively dry list of procedural and declarative knowledge; the document places no limits on how any school or individual teacher would teach the content.

As well as detailing the knowledge and vocabulary to be taught and revised in each science topic, I have added twelve ‘big ideas’ of science to the start of the document and shown how they link to each of the topics. Adam Boxer posted a thought-provoking blog-post on the way in which ‘big ideas’ can be superfluous or even limiting in secondary school science; however, I think the that the lack of science specialists in primary teaching lends genuine utility to this approach, as well as helping to define for children (and teachers) what constitutes chemistry, biology and physics; the addition of ‘earth science’ and its own ‘big ideas’ – while debatable – seems like a pragmatic addition that allows teachers to make explicit reference to (a) the links to geography, and (b) the way that the ideas of physics, chemistry and biology can overlap in areas of scientific study. Naturally, these ‘big ideas’ are easily removed from the document if they seem unnecessary to your setting.

The original document had images and diagrams added for each topic, ones that I think would be useful to the teachers in planning and delivering lessons; I have removed these from the document below in the interests of avoiding any copy-write violations. Sadly, the document is somewhat less friendly without these.

There are parts of the document that are particular to my school setting. For example, the specific trees that children are to learn by sight match ones that are found on our school grounds.** Equally, I had to make a fair few subjective decisions (e.g. exactly which parts of a plant are essential to children’s understanding in a given year group? Stigma? Ovule? Xylem?) Although I’d advise personalising any curriculum document, there is, I think, huge overlap in what many schools will attempt to teach, especially given the precision of the science national curriculum compared to, say, history or geography. That being the case, without further ado here is the link to the science progression document:

Curriculum Giveaway 2.0 – Science

Once you have downloaded the curriculum document, if you find that it saves you or your colleagues some time, please consider coming back to this page at some point and making a small donation to the Malaria Consortium using the following link. There is absolutely zero pressure to donate. If the charity bit puts you off from downloading, please just pretend it isn’t there! My central aim is to save some fellow teachers a bit of time if I can, so share it freely. A few donations to an excellent cause (in this case a top-rated GiveWell charity) would merely be a bonus:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/christopher-such2

*This structure of ‘revision’ and ‘new learning’ for each topic is borrowed from a curriculum document that @MrsSTeaches created and that she and Clare Sealy kindly shared with me; consider this an attempt to ‘pay it forward’ in response to their generosity.

**I think I saw this idea shared by Andrew Percival.

***There are bound to be a few spelling errors here or there (or even vocabulary that is defined as ‘new’ in more than one topic.) I’d hope that my decent science qualifications and teaching experience will have weeded out the vast majority of possible misconceptions in my scientific understanding, but feel free to ask questions or point out any errors. I sincerely hope that you find this useful.

Do I have to read this?

Edutwitter is a bubble, and like all social bubbles, it can be jarring when it is popped by an outsider. That’s what happened to me this week when I spoke to a friend of mine, a teacher coming to the end of his third year. Twelve months ago, he became a mathematics subject leader at a nearby primary school. He is an avid reader of fiction, and we occasionally chat about books, so he asked me what I was currently reading. When I replied that I was reading a book about mathematics pedagogy, he looked astonished. “I can’t think of anything more boring than reading about maths teaching,” he said. As delicately as I could, I probed a little further and found that he hadn’t read a single book about the teaching of mathematics since being given the role of mathematics subject leader. In fact, he claimed to have not read a single book, research paper or education blog since leaving university. From other conversations with fellow teachers, this experience of teaching is not as rare as I think we in the Edutwitter bubble might realise.

It would be very easy to become judgmental about my friend. “How could someone who is paid to be a primary school’s mathematics expert have done zero reading or research into mathematics pedagogy?” I imagine you asking, conveniently. I think the explanation has two components: time and outlook.

Time

It would be easy to write off my friend as lazy or feckless. He is not. Most weeks, he works 50+ hours, and – as far as I can tell – he is a good teacher who wants the best for his pupils. He is organised, caring and enthusiastic about his day-to-day teaching. I suspect that if I asked his headteacher to describe him in one word, ‘conscientious’ would be it: his marking is detailed, his curriculum tracking grids are evidenced and dated assiduously and his displays are pristine. Nevertheless, he is also the designated mathematics expert at a school with a bought-in ‘mastery’ curriculum who, when asked, didn’t know what ‘mastery’ meant. (When I explained mastery as, essentially, an approach where whole classes learn rapidly together with the teacher not moving on until the vast majority has understood a concept, he deemed the very idea utterly impracticable.) He understands his job as doing what he is asked to do by SLT and doing it to the letter, something that sees him working very long hours. To suggest to him under these circumstances that he ought to start reading about mathematics pedagogy – or anything related to education – seems a little short-sighted. (I did it anyway. What are friends for, eh?)

Outlook

My friend appears to lack curiosity regarding the accumulated wisdom and expertise of generations of maths teachers and researchers. It would be easy to rely on the ‘teacher as martyr’ trope as explanation for this. After all, he is busy, undeniably so. However, this is really only part of the issue. The truth is that he just doesn’t see this kind of professional development as part of his responsibilities as a teacher and mathematics subject leader. He finds the idea of reading about teaching and learning to be boring, and thus he doesn’t do it in the little free time that he gets away from school work. But here’s the crux: he doesn’t seem to think he’s missing out on anything.** Why? Probably because his school doesn’t seem to think he’s missing out on anything either. His work as mathematics subject leader – as defined by his SLT – mainly consists of undertaking book and planning scrutinies and writing half-termly reports about what he finds. His role is to ensure that teachers are following the marking policy in maths, not help them to better understand maths pedagogy. While he and his school may be an extreme case, I wonder how many core subject leaders in primary schools around the country see their role – or at least the majority of it – in these terms.

If you’re anything like me, you probably agree that this situation is pretty disheartening. There’s no point in sugar-coating it: a teacher is being paid to not teach his class for two hours leadership time per week, during which time his class is taught by someone significantly less qualified than he. This, naturally, requires significant justification, but instead this time is used to implement strategies that probably have little impact on the learning of the children across his school. So, what can be done? In my view, both aspects of the problem need to be tackled at the same time. I estimate that many primary school teachers do around 8-10 hours of work per week that has little to no impact on children’s learning (e.g. personalised marking, perfect displays, planning for the endless ‘special’ days that take place, massive documents detailing in minute detail what is done for SEND children, gathering evidence for summative assessments that still ends up relying on a vague ‘gut’ judgement, etc). Where has this pointless work come from? The answer is longer than I care to go into here, but the short version is that it appears to always lead back to our dysfunctional system of accountability and the fear of not keeping up with what other, apparently Ofsted-pleasing, schools are doing. Until this unnecessary work is stripped away, little can be done to get teachers like my friend to read about the knowledge that others have to offer.

Education isn’t my friend’s hobby; it’s his job, and if we want him to engage with the “boring” work of reading about teaching, then we need to ensure that this becomes a reasonable expectation of his working week, something that is impossible when he’s already working 50+ hours. The conditions needed for this engagement are long overdue. It’s not about a change in outlook alone; in every sense, it’s about time too.

*Before I get any understandable push-back for my willingness to criticise a fellow teacher, I should probably mention that the ‘friend’ described in this blog is a fictional construction, 90% based around a younger version of me, one who found teaching and learning to be less fascinating than I do now. I somewhat ‘fell’ into the job and only realised how much I loved it when I began to do some reading a few years ago. Funny that.

**Then again, maybe my ‘friend’ isn’t missing out on anything. Naturally, reading about pedagogy (or listening to people speak about it) isn’t the only way to show intellectual curiosity or to become a useful mathematics subject leader. Perhaps I am blinded by my bias towards reading as a form of professional self-development. Perhaps the entire premise of this blog-post is false, and it is perfectly possible for an inexperienced teacher to be a really useful subject leader without reading or listening to a damn thing. I’ve given this side of the argument some consideration, but I’m not convinced. What do you think? Answers on a postcard.

Maths fluency part 2 – a useful list?

Given the positive response to my recent blog-post on the subject of mathematical fluency, I thought a few people might find this useful…

I wrote the last blog-post because I’d been considering the areas of mathematics that were (a) most frequently relied upon in later learning[i], (b) often better taught in a few minutes each day over an extended period, and (c) absent from too many children’s repertoire of fluency. With this in mind, I began working on a list of fundamentals to be taught to the point of fluency in each year group.[ii] The point of the list was to indicate which areas of the curriculum might be best tackled using a ‘little and often’ approach after initial teaching. These are indicated in italics. (Alongside these, I included some conceptual fundamentals that I thought needed to be revisited throughout the year. These are indicated in bold.) The list is very much a work in progress, and I am open to feedback. The position of each component in a given year group matches fairly well to the national curriculum, but the idea is that this list only indicates where the ‘little and often’ teaching of each component should begin; where each component should end, however, is entirely dependent on how long it takes a class to reach fluency; this means that a component might continue into the following academic year if necessary. I post the list here merely in the hope that it might be useful to others as a jumping off point for further discussion of this topic:

primarily ‘conceptual’
primarily ‘mental fluency’

Year 1

(a) Understand and use various concrete and pictorial representations of numbers up to 100 (including all of cubes, dienes and number lines)

(b) Understand and use bar models and part-part-whole diagrams as representations of number bonds inside 20; use these to know whether an unknown is the part or whole in equations such as ? – 8 = 4 and 5 + ? = 11.

(c) Recall number bonds up to 10 (i.e. without a counting strategy)

(d) Find half of even numbers up to 20 and double of integers up to 10

(e) Count up to 20 in 2s, up to 50 in 5s and up to 100 in 10s

Year 2

(f) Understand different interpretations of addition (collecting similar objects, counting on and extending) and subtraction (removing objects, counting back, shortening and finding a difference)

(g) Understand rules of commutativity for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (i.e. addition and multiplication – order doesn’t matter; subtraction and division – order matters)

(h) Recall addition and subtraction facts inside 20 (i.e. not using a counting strategy; e.g. 7 + 6 –> double 6 then add 1 = 13 or 7 + 6 –> 7 + 3 + 3 –> 10 + 3 = 13; ideally, pure recall from practice)

(i) Use recall of addition and subtraction facts inside 20 to calculate mentally TO + O and TO – O (i.e. without a counting strategy)

(j) Using note-taking (without counting) calculate O + O + O

(k) Use concrete objects, pictures or mental strategies to calculate T + T (e.g. 70 + 20 = 90), T – T (e.g. 90 – 30 = 60), TO + T (e.g. 56 + 40 = 96) and TO – T (e.g. 89 – 40 = 49)

(l) Recall (i.e. not count up) multiplication and division facts for 2x, 5x and 10x including missing number questions (e.g. 5 x __ = 35)

Year 3

(m) Understand different interpretations of multiplication (repeated addition, increase in dimension, change in the counting unit and the scaling of a value) and division (sharing and grouping)

(n) Understand and use various concrete and pictorial representations of numbers up to 1000 (including all of dienes, place value counters and number line)

(o) Calculate mentally (without a counting strategy) HTO + O and HTO – O

(p) Count in 10s up to 200 and count in 100s up to 2000

(q) Recall (without counting) multiplication and division facts for 3x, 4x and 8x, including missing numbers (e.g. 8 x __ = 56)

Year 4

(r) Use number bonds inside 20 knowledge to calculate addition and subtraction facts for tenths inside 2.0 (e.g. 0.8 + 0.7 = 1.5)

(s) Use place value knowledge (not adding/subtracting zeros) to mentally multiply and divide by 10 and 100

(t) Recall all multiplication facts up to 12 x 12

(u) Round numbers to the nearest ten and hundred using number line representation.

(v) Recognise the decimal equivalents of tenths up to 9/10 and hundredths up to 99/100, and vice versa.

Year 5

Understand and use various concrete and pictorial representations of numbers including up to 1 000 000 and numbers including tenths, hundredths and thousandths (including all of dienes, place value counters and number line)

(x) Mentally multiply multiples of 10, 100 and 1000 by other multiples of 10 and 100 (e.g. 400 x 80 = 32 000)

(y) Mentally divide multiples of 10, 100 and 1000 by single digit numbers (e.g. 3200 ÷ 8 = 400)

(z) Calculate equivalent fractions using all multiplication facts

That’s all folks. I hope it is useful.[iii] Let me know if there you consider there to be any glaring omissions or things on the list that need not be there.

[i] Will Emeny’s blogpost showing the GCSE maths curriculum in a visual model is a fascinating way of showing the areas of the curriculum upon which other learning relies most often. In the model, each area is a node and the number of connections between each node is shown by the size of the node, making it clear which areas of the curriculum are relied upon again and again. My description doesn’t do it justice, so I’d highly recommend you follow this link:

You’ve never seen the GCSE Maths curriculum like this before…

[ii]Advocates of a genuine mastery approach will likely take me to task over this implication that there are particular components of the curriculum that require fluency, rather than the whole thing; I absolutely understand their point and agree. However, many – if not most – schools teach the curriculum in a way that Mark McCourt would describe as a ‘conveyor-belt’ approach. This being the case, identifying some areas of the curriculum where fluency is at its most important may be of some use, though I recognise the pragmatism in it.

[iii] Those of you who are familiar with Edutwitter might notice some similarities between this list and a much-reduced curriculum presented in one of the thought-provoking blogs of Solomon Kingsnorth (@solomon_teach). The difference between the two that makes this post worthwhile (I hope) is that this list by no means constitutes the breadth of the curriculum as I would like to see it. It is merely a list of the stuff that is essential and yet can slip between the cracks when teaching is seen in terms of lessons, topics and year groups.

Mental mathematics fluency and the importance of perspective

Imagine this: you are one of two people entered into a race with a large amount of money as a prize. You both arrive at the starting line fancying your chances in a foot race over any distance. (In this imagined scenario, you are quite the athlete.) You are each presented with a bicycle that you can choose to ride if you so wish. Sadly, neither you nor your competitor has ever learned to ride a bicycle. Before the two of you have time to realise that your entire existence is merely a part of a blogger’s stretched metaphor, the starting pistol goes and you’re faced with a decision – whether to learn to ride the bike or whether to leave it behind and just run. What should you do? The correct decision depends entirely on one crucial fact: the distance over which the race is to be competed. If the race is 200 metres long, then obviously the sensible decision is to ditch the bike and run. If not, your opponent will cross the line and walk off with the cash prize before you even learn how the brakes work. But what if the race is to be competed over 500 miles? Then, clearly you will stand a far better chance if you spend a few hours – or perhaps even a day or two – learning how to ride the bike. It will slow you down at first, but the eventual gains will more than make up for it. The length of the race is the crucial factor. Lose sight of that, and you’re prone to inefficient decisions.

Now imagine a year 3 teacher. Today’s lesson is on written addition. She has explained the column method, and she’s content that – having explored the dienes and place value counters – the children understand the method. She sets the class a question – 29 + 38 – and begins to purposefully wander around the room. Almost immediately, she is struck by what she sees from the majority of the children: they are adding the digits in the ones column – 9 + 8 – using a ‘counting on’ method, starting on the 9 and counting forward 8, keeping track of this by using their fingers. The majority seem to be getting the correct answer, though the ‘addition by counting on’ they are doing is a mentally laborious way to go about it. The teacher knows that this is far from ideal. She knows that these children will find all sorts of mathematics easier in the future if they develop a strategy for adding one-digit numbers based on known facts (e.g. seeing 9 + 8 as a near double; using compensation to see 9 + 8 as equivalent to 10 + 7; or perhaps even just knowing that 9 and 8 sum to 17). So, what should she do? Should she carry on as before? Or should she begin to spend five minutes every day – spread over several weeks – developing her class’s fluency with number bonds inside 20, eventually saving her children the mental effort of an inefficient ‘counting on’ strategy? She’s painfully aware that taking this time will slow her down; doing this might be beneficial in the long term, but there’s only so much time in the year. (The year before, for example, she taught bar charts and pictograms in a single lesson towards the end of the year just to cover everything she was supposed to.) She decides, this once, to leave the majority with their ‘counting on’ strategy. After all, it might be inefficient, but the class seem to be getting the correct answers. Thanks in part to the pressures and artificial delineations of individual lessons, topics and year groups, she has lost sight of that one crucial factor: the length of the race. Her kids have set off on their 500 mile trek, and their bicycle is at the starting line.

With the day-to-day pressures of teaching, it is all too easy to forget that our kids are in this for the long haul. We must remember that we are building something. Mathematics, in particular, is a highly hierarchical subject; if a foundation is poorly built, the effect it has on the construction above is exponential. In my experience, the most confounding gaps in children’s mathematical abilities are those that are difficult to teach in the space of a few lessons. There is much in primary school mathematics that is understood with relative ease, but requires a great deal of practice before it becomes fluent; number bonds inside 20 and the related subtraction facts are a perfect example of this.[i] I challenge anyone to ‘teach’ this fluency to children over just a few lessons. Like fluency with multiplication facts (and the related division facts), these need to be seen regularly for a considerable period – though perhaps just for a few minutes each day – for them to become fluent. This is not to advocate any particular method for teaching this. Children can practise these against the clock, keeping their answers private; they can quiz each other using cards; they can play games that expose them to these facts over and over. How they see them is, in my view, less important than how often they see them. Regardless, one thing is certain: if we don’t take every opportunity to prioritise long-term efficiency over short-term convenience, then we are doing the children in our classes a major disservice.

A few things I find useful in teaching underlying mental skills:

1. ‘Little and often’ is perhaps the most time-efficient way to develop fluency with mental mathematics. Five hours spread over ten weeks (roughly five minutes per day) seems to be far more effective than the same amount of time spread over one week.

2. Take the pressure off. It’s perfectly possible to quiz children – and have children mark their own work – without there being any stress about performance or speed. In my experience, if you give children a separate strip of paper with the questions and ask them to mark their own work when you share the answers, they soon realise that the only pressure is their own desire to improve. Children almost always take pleasure in developing their fluency over time. It often becomes the part of the lesson they like most.

3. Use routines and don’t be afraid to use the same activities and resources repeatedly. Routines allow children to engage with the actual learning rather than dealing with the superficial elements of an activity.

4. Be persistent. Beyond the rarest of exceptions, all children can learn fluency in the underlying mental mathematics skills. Have faith that this will lead to considerably more effective learning in the long term.

[i] This is not to suggest that the different interpretations of basic addition and subtraction do not require a great deal of conceptual understanding; they absolutely do, ideally through a variety of physical and visual structures. Peter Mattock’s book Visible Maths is superb on this subject.

Tier two vocabulary for primary teachers – the 3-4-5 list

Vocabulary is an essential component of reading comprehension and learning. The challenge for teachers is that it is hard to know where to begin when teaching vocabulary. Too many words, too little time. In their influential book, Bringing Words to Life, Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan attempt to provide some structure to this challenge by suggesting that vocabulary can be divided into three tiers:

Tier one: Common words that students are likely to pick up through everyday conversation. (E.g. dog, through, chair, know.)

Tier two: High-frequency words for “mature language users”. In other words, the sort of words that are useful and that appear across learning domains, but that students might not experience in everyday language. (E.g. distribute, analyse, context.)

Tier three: Subject-specific words. (E.g. photosynthesis, alliteration, refraction.)

Beck et al argue that teachers should pay particular attention to tier two words due to their high utility and because students may not be exposed to them otherwise. To facilitate this, they point to academic word lists made up of tier two vocabulary. This is a useful jumping off point, but this raises two questions for primary teachers:

Which tier two words that are not on these academic word lists should we teach?
Which tier two words on the academic word lists are most appropriate to teach at primary school? (As ever, there is a balance between aspiration and practicability.)

To answer the first question, I read various lists of the most common words in the English language, found the tier two words within these lists and then added them to the original academic word list to make a longer hybrid list.

My answer to the second question is, inevitably, a judgment call. I resorted to using my best guess to decide which words from this new hybrid list should be removed and left for secondary school. I have worked in year 5 and 6 for the last decade – briefly teaching key stage 3 students before that – so my ‘best guess’ is also, I hope, a somewhat educated guess. Nonetheless, I recognise that there is something entirely subjective about judging whether or not a year 6 pupil should be taught, for example, the word ‘subsidiary’. I suspect that no single teacher would agree with every one of my chosen omissions, but I hope that this doesn’t entirely devalue the list itself.

The end result is the list of 345 words you see below. In compiling the list, I had to decide whether to keep words in the form in which they were found or to convert them to different forms. (E.g. Keep ‘accurate’ in its adjective form or whether to change it to the noun ‘accuracy’.) I decided on the former, but I would hope that any teaching of these words would involve the explicit sharing of the related forms. You might spot glaring omissions in the list or think that certain words don’t belong. You may well be right. Regardless, I hope that this list of 345 tier two words – one I have imaginatively titled ‘the 3-4-5-list’ when discussing it with colleagues – might prove useful:

abandon, abstract, absolutely, access, accompany, accurate, achieve, acquire, adaptation, advantage, affect, aid, alter, alternative, analysis, announce, annual, anticipate, appearance, appreciation, approach, appropriate, area, assessment, association, assume, assumption, atmosphere, attached, attained, attitudes, attract, audience, authority, automatic, available, aware, basic, benefit, bond, brief, budget, capable, category, cease, channel, circumstances, civil, clarity, code, collapse, combine, comment, commit, common, communication, community, compare, complex, component, conceived, concept, conclusion, condition, confirmed, confined, conflict, conscious, consequences, consider, consistent, constant, construction, contact, context, contract, contrast, contribution, control, controversial, converted, convinced, co-operation, core, couple, create, crucial, cultural, cycle, data, debate decline, definite, definition demonstrate, deny, design, despite, detect, develop, device, dimension, discrimination, display, distorted, distribute, diversity, document, dominant, draft, duration, dynamic, economy, efficient, eliminate, emerged, emphasis, enable, encounter, energy, enhanced, ensure, entire, environment, equipment, error, establish, estimate, ethical, evaluation, eventually, evidence, evolution, examine, example, exceed, exchange, excluded, exhibit, exist, expansion, experience, expert, exploitation, external, extract, factor, familiar, features, file, final, flexibility, focus, format, foundation, framework, frequent, furthermore, generated, global, goals, government, guarantee, hierarchy, highlighted, identical, identified, ignored, image, impact, imposed, incident, indicate, individual, inferred, influence, initial, innovation, input, insert, insight, instruction, intelligence, intensity, intention, interaction, internal, international, investigate, involved, isolated, issues, justification, label, layer, limit, link, literature, location, logic, maintain, major, market, maximum, media, medium, mental, method, migration, military, minimum, monitoring, motivation, national, necessary, negotiation, neutral, nevertheless, nonetheless, object, objective, obtained, obvious, occur, odd, option, organise, outcomes, overall, overcome, overseas, period, persistent, perspective, phase, phenomenon philosophy, physical, political, popular, positive, possession, potential, precise, predicted, previous, principle, prior, priority, procedure, process, prohibited, propose, prospect, public, published, pursue, quotation, random, reaction, recognise, recovery, refine, region, rejected, related, release, reluctant, removed, represent, required, research, reserve, resources, response, restore, retained, revealed, reverse, revision, revolution, rigid, role, route, schedule, scheme, section, security, select, sensitive, separate, sequence, series, severe, shift, signal, significant, similar, site, society, solely, source, specific, stability, standard, strategies, structure, style, subsequent, substitution, sufficient, suitable, summary, supply, support, survive, sustainable, symbol, system, target, technique, technology, temporary, tension, text, theme, theory, traditional, transfer, transform, transport, transition, trend, trigger, typical, underlying, unique, united, variation, via, visible, visual, volume, voluntary, whereas

Here are some resources I used in compiling this list and others that you might find useful:

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: Guilford.

Quigley, A. (2018). Closing the Vocabulary Gap. Abingdon, Oxon : New York, NY : Routledge

https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist

https://www.wordfrequency.info/compare_bnc.asp

https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/compare-bnc.asp

https://www.lextutor.ca/freq/lists_download/longman_3000_list.pdf

Closing the language gap: Building vocabulary

Motivation and mastery: what’s the deal?

Just before Christmas when I was a child in year 7, my music teacher wheeled out the television and put on West Side Story. The film was roughly two hours long but the lesson was an hour. We watched half the film, and then we were done. I never saw the end. The same thing happened in the summer with Annie. The following Christmas, I didn’t see the end of Oliver. And the pattern continued in each of the final music lessons that fell before a school holiday. (Not before half terms, mind; the music department weren’t that slack.) By the time I got to year 9, I barely bothered to watch even the first five minutes of Singin’ in the Rain. I knew I wasn’t going to see the end of the film, so I tuned out entirely.

For the past few years, on and off, I have taught smallish groups that consist almost entirely of students who – for a variety of reasons – have fallen far behind where they should be. My day-to-day experience has hammered home one idea over all others: People hate failing at things, especially in front of their peers.

And this is a problem because, let’s face it, a lot of our students experience a lot of failure. Something is taught, but little or nothing is really understood. The next lesson brings something new because the teacher can’t just wait for every student to ‘get it’, and the failure is just left to hang in the air. The children start the film, maybe even reach the middle, but there’s no ending, no resolution. Perhaps they’ll see it next year.

As these children’s experiences of failure accumulate, many become immune to the things we commonly do and say to motivate them. We’ve all taught the kid who refuses any reward, his way of showing you that he knows exactly what you’re up to. There’s no way around it. If children don’t succeed the vast majority of the time, then they will slowly, but inevitably, lose motivation, and – this is the controversial part – I think sometimes this plays a role in children’s classroom behaviour. No amount of confidence-building or sensitivity (nor systematic use of sanctions and rewards for that matter) will undo the damage to motivation wrought by persistent failure.

Now, before I’m accused of teacher-blaming, let me make this clear: there are plenty of reasons – many of them unrelated to the teaching process – that can lead to challenging behaviour. Consistent systems with clear boundaries and predictable consequences are essential, as are caring relationships and a culture of mutual respect.

Nevertheless, we also have the ability, I believe, to tip the odds of motivating children significantly in our favour; not just as individuals for our own sake, however, but across the profession and for every teacher that comes after us. Every time a student experiences the initial confusion of a new concept or bit of knowledge without the eventual resolution that comes from genuine understanding, we take a small but significant bite out of their motivation in the long term. We should keep this in mind more than I think we do.

This isn’t a banal call for us simply to be better teachers whose students succeed more frequently. It is a defence of a position that demands that we slow down when we need to, that we leave fewer children to languish, their motivation sacrificed to the false gods of ‘pace’ and ‘curriculum coverage’. It is an attack on a status quo that, in my view, is too ready to accept that some kids – often a significant minority of a class – ‘just won’t get it’.*

Naturally there will always be exceptions to this. One or two children in a class – perhaps those unlikely to attend mainstream secondary education – might not be ready for the curriculum as you deliver it, and you might need to draw a line, deciding to teach a concept to that child at a later date. But where we draw this line is hugely important, and in my experience, it is often drawn in the wrong place.

This is my interpretation of the contract between teacher and student. It’s nothing new, of course. It’s basically part of a mastery approach: “Put the effort in, kid, and I will not leave you behind. That’s the deal.” I think we systematically underestimate the importance of honouring this deal.

Quite simply, if we want to motivate more children to engage with the learning we offer, then they need to be able to trust that – most of the time at least – we will give them the chance to see the end of the film.

* It’s astonishing how often these kids are at the younger end of a year group. If you get the chance, cross reference your class’s birthdays against your perception of their innate ability. In my experience, it is often an eye-opener.

Choosing How We Fail

This is roughly what happened:

“Sorry,” said a young woman, interrupting my friend and me. “I’ve my lost my purse, and I’m trying to scrape enough money together to get a bus home. I only need another pound.” Immediately, my friend reached into his pocket and handed over a £1 coin.

“Best of luck,” said my friend, and the woman smiled gratefully and walked away.

“That might be a scam,” I said. “I’m sure I’ve read somewhere about people making a packet doing that. We’ll probably see her later on still asking people for money.”

“We might,” he said, “but there are two ways to be wrong in that situation. Either I give her the money, she’s lying and I’m wrong through being naive, or I don’t give her the money, she’s telling the truth and I’m wrong through being cynical. In one case, I’ve been scammed. In the other, I’ve missed a chance to give help to someone who needed it. I know which mistake I can live with.”

This brief conversation from over a decade ago occasionally springs to mind when I see a particularly bitter EduTwitter spat on the subject of behaviour in schools. When teachers discuss behaviour management, we seem to readily ignore or forget our own personal relationship with it. I think that the hidden foundation of this debate is found in our answer to the following question: What type of failure do we each find easiest to stomach?

Despite the chaotic reality, we are usually left with a fairly simple choice whenever we wish to tackle most challenging behavior: Do we adapt the environment to help the student, or do we help the student adapt to the environment? For example, imagine that you have a student who struggles to concentrate for even brief periods of time. It has been suggested that he might benefit from a book to doodle in during lessons. Do you follow the suggestion (i.e. adapt the environment) or do you encourage and nudge him to undergo the difficult process of improving his ability to concentrate (i.e. help the student to adapt)? Neither answer is necessarily correct. Naturally, the optimal choice – if there even is one – depends on the student and the exact circumstances, but my point is that we can never know for sure which one is the right choice in any given moment. Err on the side of adapting the environment, and you might have missed an opportunity to develop the student’s capabilities. Err on the side of helping the student to adapt, and you might put him through a demoralizing, unsuccessful struggle. The vast majority of us have failed in both ways countless times. I contend that our views on behavior management are affected by which type of failure we find easier to stomach, and that it is this gut reaction that partly makes the debate around behavior so emotive.

For the sake of argument, I would like you to consider a spectrum of attitudes to behavior management. At one extreme are those that go far beyond all expectations to adapt the environment so that every student feels entirely at ease and ready to learn. At the other end of the spectrum are those that set a consistent, exacting standard for all students. Let’s call it the soft touch-hard bastard spectrum:

Is there a Nobel prize for sociology? Asking for a friend.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have no interest in advocating for any given point on this spectrum as the right one for all teachers. I haven’t anything like the experience required for that. Nor do I think that many teachers, if any, operate at the extremes of this spectrum. Just go with me on this for a moment.

Let me introduce a hard bastard: Like everyone, she makes mistakes with her behavior management, but the failures she fears most are when she underestimates a student’s ability to change. If in doubt, she expects a student to learn new, beneficial habits, and she hates the idea of missing an opportunity to do this. Most of her failures come when she overestimates a student’s ability to change. The negative consequences of these failures are felt deeply by a small number of students.

And now here’s a soft touch: Like everyone, she makes mistakes with her behavior management, but the mistakes she fears most are when she lets a vulnerable student experience demoralising failure. If in doubt, she adapts the learning environment – rules and all – so that the chances of failure are minimized. Most of her failures come when she underestimates a student’s ability to change. The negative consequences of these failures are not felt deeply, but they affect a large number of students.

While it’s tempting to conclude this blog-post by saying something comforting about the middle ground, I’m not going to. I’d consider myself to be somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and all this means is that I tend to experience a fairly equal mix of both types of failure. Naturally, this is all a gross simplification. Teachers are able to reduce the frequency and magnitude of their failures with experience, and every teacher has moments of being a soft touch and a hard bastard. So why write this? When discussing behaviour management, accepting the weaknesses of one’s own approach can be seen as unnecessarily ceding ground. However, I believe that healthy, productive debate relies on it. None of us are perfect, we all fail and the teachers who have a different view of behavior management to us might just have a different tolerance for the two main types of failure we all experience. Perhaps if they were forced to choose the other type of failure more often, teaching would be unbearable for them.

Like a friend once explained to me, perhaps all we can do is decide which mistakes we can live with.

What we say and what they hear

You say it with widely varying degrees of success… when you say nothing at all.
Ronan Keating (first draft)

Sometimes words that are not said are the most memorable. In my NQT year, I repeatedly observed an experienced teacher for whom I had a great deal of respect. She was a warm, engaging, thoughtful person with sky-high expectations, and I learned plenty from watching her. Quite unfairly, however, one phrase that she used with her year 6 maths class has stuck in my memory. Whenever the class’s motivation seemed to wane, she would stop, pause for effect and then – with a quiet severity in her voice – ask the children, rhetorically, “Bus stop or BMW? Which do you want when you’re older?” The very idea struck me as odd at the time, and with each passing year I wonder more why I did not question it.

Just think about the pair of implications that are attached to that pithy phrase, “Bus stop or BMW?”:

1. At the age of 10 or 11, the aim of education is eventual wealth.

2. Using public transport is a bad thing to be avoided through academic success.

I suspect that the teacher in question, if pressed, would have described the purposes of education in the same idealistic tones that we are conditioned to expect from the profession. Regardless, a phrase she used to motivate her class – “bus stop or BMW” – contained within it a set of counter-productive implications that the students cannot have failed to have grasped.

Children may often struggle with algebra and the subjunctive voice, but they are naturals when it comes to inferring the implicit messages beneath what adults say. They are like jazz aficionados hearing every note left unplayed. Recently, Doug Lemov[i] and Adam Boxer[ii] wrote blog-posts that discuss the subtle linguistic cues that students pick up on. Regardless of one’s views on these methods of behaviour management, both of those teachers are keenly aware of the power of the implicit and how we must think carefully about how we control it. It has made me think about some other common teacher interactions that I have heard in schools over the years and the implied messages that were inadvertently communicated:

I expect better effort from someone as clever as you. = If you struggle with this subject, I don’t really expect you to try hard.

Ten out of ten? That’s amazing! = I am surprised that you succeeded.

Everyone’s good at something. = Working hard to improve is not as important as having one skill at which you are naturally better than other people. Anchor your self-worth on that one thing.

Someone called you ugly? How silly! You’re not ugly at all! = Someone gave a negative judgement of your appearance, but don’t worry because I’m judging you positively in that regard. There’s no need to question the entire premise of superficiality that underlies the insult and my response.

It’s hard to analyse the exact implications of every statement that we make. Heaven knows that I can put my foot in it.[iii] It’s worth being reminded occasionally of the importance of the implicit in every situation, not just in the day-to-day struggle of behaviour management. Sometimes words that are not said are the most memorable.

[i] http://teachlikeachampion.com/tag/behavioral-expectations/

[ii] https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/managing-management-a-couple-of-tips-and-tricks-for-better-behaviour/

[iii] This blog post reminds me of my friend and colleague who, having returned to work following her pregnancy, was greeted by the following words from my stupid mouth: “Wow! You look like you’ve lost fifty stone!” The fact that she took my ‘compliment’ in the spirit that it was intended is indicative of her generosity and tolerance.

Are your lesson observations a wasted opportunity?

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!
William Strunk

Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?
E.B.White

Meet Hannah. She’s in her fourth year of teaching. Today she took part in her second formal lesson observation of the year, roughly her 30th observation since she began her PGCE. In preparation, she discussed her lesson plan with colleagues. She spent hours creating resources and differentiating for every possible outcome or detour in her lesson. (Away from the prying eyes of the SLT observers, a stack of unused ‘extension tasks’ went into the bin at the end of the lesson, unneeded as they turned out to be.) She stuck sheets into children’s books so that not a single second of the learning time would be wasted, though usually the kids would do this job themselves. She sharpened pencils, cleaned whiteboards and imagined each part of the lesson with the precise foresight of a military logistician. She told children about the upcoming observation and subtly ensured that children knew that the rewards and sanctions for their actions during this precious period of time would be greater than usual. Immediately after the lesson, she scoured the checklist – the one given to each teacher at the start of the year – to ensure that everything had been included during her 40 minute observation. Cooperative learning? Check. A mention of homework? Check. Mini-plenary? Check. Visible excitement for learning? Check. Thinking skills in one of the agreed school formats? Check. (The observers surely saw on her lesson plan that her plenary explicitly referenced de Bono’s red thinking hat.) In short, this was no ordinary lesson. Now, as she skips from the meeting room in which she received glowing feedback, she feels that her hard work has paid off.

Meet Sarah. She is in her third year of teaching, and for the past two years Edutwitter has become a slightly-too-prominent part of her daily routine. While she remembers little of the pedagogy that was discussed during her initial teacher training, since then she has read countless books, blogs and research papers (though often just the abstracts and conclusions of these). Having initially tried to apply all at once everything she had learned – with chaotic results – she is now committed to changing her teaching one element at a time. Most recently, she has focused on improving her questioning. She finds that particular techniques (cold-calling, pose-pounce-bounce, etc) have begun to ensure that all children in the class are listening and that she understands the children’s misconceptions better than before. She has read Tom Sherrington’s blog-post on the subject at least five times.[i] She is never truly satisfied with her teaching in any given lesson, but she is confident that she is traveling in a positive direction. At this moment, she is sitting quietly in her classroom, having just received her feedback from today’s lesson observation. She is not visibly upset; that is just not her style. But she is demoralised. As much as possible, she tried to ensure that she taught the way she usually would. The observing members of SLT said some complimentary things about her lesson, but they were not happy about the desks that were in rows; they were not happy about the amount of time spent on consolidating learning from the previous lesson; they were not happy that the displays on the working wall did not have the date written on them, in line with school policy. (“Who knows how long they’ve been on the wall?”) These same observers will decide whether she moves up the pay scale at the end of the year and whether she is suitable for a position of responsibility. Sarah occasionally thinks about looking for another school, but she is told by colleagues that this is “just how it is everywhere now”. She has a 1st class degree in accountancy and is beginning to think that she isn’t a good fit for primary teaching.

Meet Joanne. She is the head teacher, and she dedicates her life to the school. It is 5:30 PM, and she has just realised that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast. She is mentally exhausted from a day of observing lessons and giving feedback. It has been worth it, mind. The school is a different place to the one she took over two years ago. Having seen the effects of disappointing Ofsted inspections first-hand as a deputy head in her previous school, she knows that what she is doing is for the best in the long run. This is her first headship, and she is desperate for the next Ofsted inspection to go well; she wants some breathing space so she can begin to create the school she’s always wanted to lead. Beyond that, she eventually wants to work in education on a level above any individual school, and developing an “outstanding” school seems like a necessary launchpad for such ambitions. Thus, every structure – from lesson observations to interventions to assessment – has been designed to provide straightforward, easily-argued answers to whichever inspector has to judge the entire workings of a school over the course of just a few hours. She suspects that assessment results will always be paramount, despite Ofsted’s claims to the contrary, so she has ensured that SATs booster clubs now start in year 5, though not with that name, of course. Today’s lesson observations were another tiny step towards her goal: apart from a few exceptions, the teaching across the school aligned very well with the checklist she created. (Three out of the four NQTs are struggling to meet the school’s expectations, but one seems to be doing fine, evidence that the other three just need to pull their socks up.) Ofsted will doubtless want to know how well Joanne understands the teaching across the school, and if everyone sticks to the checklist, she can be confident in every answer she gives. As she so often says, consistency is key. Recently, she’s heard a lot about retrieval practice and is convinced of its efficacy. The only question is exactly how much of each lesson should she ask teachers to dedicate to it. Five minutes? Ten? There’s no need to decide that now. That one can be added to next year’s checklist.

The above cases are all fabrications, obviously. However, they are representative of most of the schools in which I have worked and reflect what I have been told by the majority of primary teachers that I have met. I was tempted to let the above vignettes speak for themselves, but against my better judgement, I’m not going to. Some thoughts:

Any lesson observation where a teacher is hoping to impress and puts on a lesson ‘for show’ is a wasted opportunity to improve their day-to-day teaching. School leaders must ensure that their teachers know this.
Before a lesson observation, school leaders should ask a teacher exactly what they are trying to improve in their teaching and why. The observation should then support the teacher in this area of improvement and then discuss future areas that the teacher could work on. (If a teacher is not focused on an area of improvement, then the aim of the lesson observation should be to find one.) Becoming a better teacher is a process of inculcating new habits. This takes weeks or even months and is inevitably achieved (or not) by the teacher when no one is watching. A lesson observation structure that does not recognise this fact and does not consequently work within its confines is a wasted opportunity.
I suspect that on some intrinsic level, lesson observations will always mirror the power dynamic of Ofsted inspections. Ofsted inspections are perceived primarily as something ‘done to’ schools, who are thus more keen to impress than to improve. Due to this, many schools’ attitude to Ofsted is similar to Hannah’s attitude to lesson observations: Put on a show. Earn praise. Get back to business. It’s tempting to blame the individual teacher or school for adapting to their environment in whatever way maximises praise and minimises criticism from those in authority, especially when doing so is patently short-sighted; individual responsibility is important, after all. But at some point we must address the circumstances that incentivise such attitudes.[ii]

[i] https://teacherhead.com/2018/08/24/great-teaching-the-power-of-questioning/

[ii] There are a lot of positive noises coming from Ofsted currently. However, I hope they do not lose sight of the fact that many of the changes that they are suggesting are part of an attempt to undo damage that has already been inflicted by Ofsted themselves. Accountability almost always seems to create perverse incentives; this should inspire caution and humility in those who seek it.

The main weakness of whole-class, explicit instruction (and how to minimise it)

A few years back, when my priority in lesson observations was to impress whoever was watching, I had a few tricks to ensure that a lesson ran smoothly and to make me look pretty good. The first trick was to teach something that the children hadn’t yet seen that was also conceptually fairly simple; this made it a doddle to ‘show progress’. (I know, I know…yuck!) The second trick was to ensure that my interactive whiteboard slides were extremely detailed, so much so that even if I lost my voice, the slides would give a decent explanation on my behalf. The third and most important trick was to plan a lesson with very little teacher talk or modelling. Why did I feel this necessary? Well, this brings me to the title of this blog-post…

Perhaps the greatest strength of whole-class explicit instruction is that it allows a teacher to break down a new concept into several small steps and to model each one. For example, rounding to the nearest hundred can be broken into five steps:

1. Recognise multiples of 100.

2. Find the next multiple of 100 above a given number.

3. Find the multiple of 100 below a given number.

4. Find the midpoint between two adjacent multiples of 100.

5. Compare a given number to a midpoint.

Explicitly teaching these five steps seems to promote a pretty decent understanding of what rounding means and how to do it (with shortcuts being taught later). It allows a teacher to see, and address, exactly which steps of the process might cause some to struggle. However, this same deconstruction into steps also accentuates the greatest weakness of whole-class explicit instruction, particularly to those observing a one-off lesson: Often when one group of students – let’s call them strugglers – needs further help with a step, there will be other students – let’s call them high-fliers – who already find the same step to be trivially easy. (Remember: these are not fixed labels; these two groups are merely the students who do and don’t struggle with a given step.) This is, of course, a more regular occurrence in a class with a large spread of current attainment. To anyone observing, this could look like the lesson has been pitched incorrectly or that differentiation is lacking. The alternative – typically a lesson with activities differentiated by task to the exact needs of various groups and with minimal teacher talk – certainly looks better in a one-off observation: the kids can all be busy and the highest attainers are demonstrably challenged. However, in the long run it is in the interests of the whole class – even the highest attainers – that the vast bulk of the class master the taught content so that their teacher doesn’t have to focus more and more of her attention on supporting those that have become irrevocably left behind.* A reliance upon frequent task-based differentiation – while it can lead to smooth-looking lessons – accepts and increases the gap between the highest and lowest attainers, and eventually is bad news for both. Whole-class, explicit teaching is a distinctly messier, less predictable affair, but it means that teachers constantly address the gaps between the lowest and highest-attaining students, temporarily privileging the interests of the former in the long-term interests of all, including the latter.

To recap, the greatest potential weakness of whole-class, explicit instruction is that the high-fliers will sometimes need to independently complete tasks that deepen thinking while the teacher’s attention focuses on the strugglers who are grappling with a single step in a new concept. This may seem less than ideal, but only by not moving on until the vast majority have mastered each step will a teacher lay the foundations upon which the learning of the whole class relies.

That said, what can we do to minimise this potential weakness of whole-class explicit instruction?

When planning, consider each step of a new concept, and ask the following question: What task will I set to deepen the thinking of the high-fliers while I help the strugglers? (e.g. In my rounding example above, I could ask children to define a multiple or to write a list of numbers that would and would not be multiples of 100, explaining how they can tell the difference. The best examples require no extra resourcing. They can simply be written on a whiteboard.)
Don’t be afraid to simply give students further examples to practice. A little over-learning is not the end of the world.
Where appropriate (and this requires careful judgment), enlist the high-fliers to guide the understanding of those struggling with a step.
Be flexible: students will surprise you sometimes with what they do and don’t understand. Accept that effective teaching needs to adapt to the current understanding of your students, and that sometimes you won’t see the true level of this understanding until you’re in the lesson.
That said, pre-assessment is your friend. The more you can assess students’ abilities to tackle each step in a process in advance, the better you will anticipate when you will need tasks to deepen thinking.

Every teaching method has potential weaknesses. I advocate whole-class explicit instruction which privileges the needs of those that most need support and which underpins the learning of the whole class in the long run, even if it means I sometimes look less impressive to an observer and have to trust myself more to think on my feet.**

*Naturally, there will be some circumstances, especially in primary school, where frequent differentiation by task will simply have to take place, but it is best considered as a last resort in my view.

**I don’t stick religiously to whole-class explicit instruction. When appropriate, I quite often teach using collaborative activities, open-ended enquiries (once concepts are mastered), etc. However, explicit whole-class teaching is my default choice when I want a class to understand a new concept.