I can’t get no sleep…. (or what I’ve been up to these past months…)

“But there’s no release, no peace
I toss and turn without cease
Like a curse, open my eyes and rise like yeast”

Insomnia, Faithless, 1995

This is one of the all time classic dance tracks (indeed, it is my favourite dance track of the 1990s) and it has been quite prevalent in my mind recently. Because for the past five or six weeks, I have been suffering regular sleep loss. This blog is hopefully part of the process of dealing with the issues that have caused my depleted sleep.

I was always adamant that I would never change jobs in the middle of a school year. In 2010, however, I moved at May half term, and spent the last 6/7 weeks of the year at my new school, settling in with no real teaching timetable (in reality, I DID teach a few lessons, to a greater degree as the half term went on, but it wasn’t really full-time teaching). It was pretty easy for me.

After missing out on a couple of TLRs, I had decided this would be my last school year at my current school. However, a chance browsing of the TES jobs site one day caught my eye. A job was advertised at one of the fastest improving schools in Leeds. They held an open day which I attended with my wife (just as she had done 5 years earlier before I got my current job). We heard the executive headteacher speak. He was deeply impressive in his vision and his convictions. He spoke of mindset and a rigid positive discipline system. To put it into context, he was so impressive even my wife said she wouldn’t mind working in one of his schools – and she can’t stand children!

So I applied, I heard back, I went for interview. The school was fantastic – not a new building, but one full of impressive displays, full of incredibly polite and attentive students. I could even have my own room! My lesson went pretty well, and I felt I nailed the interview. Hours later, the call came. I had been successful!

This was the Wednesday before half term. Since then, my head has been racing in my quieter times, including, clearly, last thing at night. I am racked with excitement, nervousness, and self doubt. I went for my day at my new school on Thursday and, although I know my timetable, I am still waiting for confirmation of topics to teach. And so my insomnia persists.

Let me make it clear: this is not a criticism of my new employers. I know what is expected of me in terms of end of the year grades. When I do receive the confirmation I am after, I shall be ready. Ready to begin intensively planning for this new and exciting chapter in my career. I chapter I WANTED to embark upon.

It’s just…..there seems so much to think about now:

• what posters do I display?
• what messages do I want to convey in my first week?
• how can I help the students in making the transition from one member of staff to me as seamless as possible?
• what happens if I go in too harshly?
• and finally….what if I fail?

So now I have shared my worries, a) I hope I shall begin to sleep better, but b) I need your help. Those of you who have moved jobs mid-year – how did you cope? What advice would you share? Can you confirm that I will indeed be absolutely fine?

Please???

Negative numbers, Pythagoras, and automaticity in teaching…

A bit haphazard this post, but I was doing my usual Sunday evening thing of reviewing my Twitter favourites, catching up on blogs and resources, and came across a couple of things that I wanted to share some thoughts on. The first was this post from @cavmaths on the topic of damaging short cuts – or as I call it in my lessons, cheap and dirty maths. I have a few pet hates – but number one is teachers who encourage students to ‘just add a zero’ when multiplying by 10 (to which my immediate response is “so if I see something in a shop for £4.99, does that mean I can buy 10 of them for £4.990?”). But I digress – the reason for me discussing this post is not to turn it into a rant about my pet hates, but because the original post was about negative numbers, which I am half way through teaching with my year 7 groups.

Negative numbers is a really important concept to get a grasp of early – my year 11s have shown some difficulties early this term in the context of negative terms when expanding brackets, to name but one example. So, knowing I was due to teach it early on in the year, I was intrigued to see this explanation given to an answer on Quora.com (the full thread can be found here):

“The key idea is that negative numbers represent changes, not amounts. It doesn’t make sense to say that you have -4 slices of bread. It does, however, make sense to say that you ate 4 slices of bread, and therefore the change in the number of slices you have is -4.” (My emphasis)

This was a revelation for me – a really clear and succinct example that I was desperate to use in my teaching. I was lucky I had an upcoming opportunity. I knew from their pretests (see my summer posts) that my year 7s were not confident on negative numbers, so I set up a slide to show a game scenario where I received a point each time I won, but my opponent gained a point when they won. I expressed this as my receiving -1 when my opponent won. We modelled a variety of situations, focussing on the total. The initial results seem encouraging, with the students telling me they have a much clearer understanding about negative numbers. Tomorrow we move on to multiplying and subtracting after a quick recap, but I now can’t wait to do the post-test in a couple of weeks to see if it really DID make a difference. I suspect it did, and I suspect I have a ‘banker’ method for teaching a key topic.

Pythagoras – even simpler than a, b, c!

Another of my pet hates is the teaching of Pythagoras’ Theorem. Our year 11s are taught identikit lessons put together by our SLT maths link, which states that a^2 + b^2 = c^2. WHY???? My immediate response (I always seem to have one….!) is “well how do you know which is side a, b and c?” Clearly this method is based on labelling the hypotenuse as c. Here’s a thought, though: if you know that c is the hypotenuse, why not call it, I don’t know, h for shorthand? Or hyp? After all, Pythagoras’ Theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. By using the a, b, c method, I fear students assume that the square of one side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. And if they DO know which side is c, surely it makes sense (and is more correct mathematically) to give that side its proper mathematical name!

There is, of course, a question to be asked about how to label the other two sides. Not having an angle in Pythagoras situations (certainly not when introducing the topic), it would be unhelpful to use adjacent and opposite, or any shorthand thereof. In my own teaching, I refer to the other two sides simply as ss1 and ss2 (ss meaning ‘shorter side’). I explain that because the hypotenuse is the longest side, the other two sides are both shorter. It is irrelevant to distinguish further between the two.

I have yet to receive any negative feedback about this approach.

Automaticity in teaching

The second tweet was this from @oliverquinlan, which posed the question “How much can you systematise your teaching..?” The post is of little use to me (it is effectively an advert for a book), but the question resonated with me greatly. Systematising teaching – making it as predictable as possible is my interpretation – is something I have been trying to do with regard to my planning and my timetabling of my non-contact time, and which I wrote about during the summer. The reason is cognitive and expressed in ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ By getting into habits, reducing the number of decisions we make, and becoming robotic in certain aspects of our practice, we open ourselves up to creativity. As Willingham says, creative thoughts occur most when we think. By making things systematic, we think less, and our creativity increases. I can certainly point to many examples already this year of this in action. I can honestly say I feel like a different teacher. Systematising my teaching has definitely worked for me!

Week 1 reflections

I thought, having a bit of spare time this evening, I might post about my first week of the new term and how some of the things I have talked about over the summer have been going. Or not going.

1)  Reflection time and reflective journal – Not for the students, but for me! I have to say this has had a MASSIVE impact so far. Each day when I have thought about my day on the way home and written them down, I have been prompted immediately with things to do better/more effectively tomorrow. Not only that, but I feel I have more purpose, not only in lessons, but also in my non-contact time. And when I haven’t completed it, I’ve found a bit of a difference. I think the reason for this is that taking a step back and reflecting on things helps you to get out of the ‘daily grind’ of teaching. Which, after a full teaching day today for the first time, let me tell you, can be very easy to fall into! If I could make one recommendation, keeping a reflective journal would be it. I wish I’d done it years ago.

2) Switching off from the world – I wrote about this in my blog here, and I have to say it’s still going pretty well. I’m not running away from news, and in my down time I will still browse news sites, but unlike before, I’m not spending ages scrolling repeatedly and pointlessly looking for the latest micro-development. And, believe it or not, I don’t feel any poorer for it.

3) Teaching/- I don’t know why, but I have started this term taking a few more risks and doing activities I haven’t really done before. Already students have used their planners as mini whiteboards, and yesterday and today I used Diagnostic Questions with a couple of my classes. Things have changed so dramatically that I have even….wait for it…..CREATED SOME RESOURCES OF MY OWN TO SHARE!!! I spent a few minutes at the weekend creating a set of 10 Diagnostic Questions for the website of the same name and tonight, looking for a homework for my year 8s and being inspired by the PRET homeworks which can be found at http://www.resourceaholic.com/p/homework.html, I decided to create and submit my own (well, I used existing formatting – one step at a time – but it’s a start). 

Of course, it’s never a case of having teaching ‘figured out’, and already there are challenges in the classroom this year. I guess for all the planning you do over the summer, the proof is only really ever in lessons. Some things work, some don’t. But I am encouraged by the start I’ve made (and, to be fair, most of my students have made – in particular my year 11s, who have been FAB so far) and I think I’ve managed to set homework for all of my classes thus far!

I have another post planned about a pedagogical issue which regularly gets under my skin, but that can wait for a while…..

My pedagogical plan for 2014-15 (or how I intend to teach…)

I’m feeling really excited and confident about the new term. Brimming with a whole new set of ideas I’ve got a grip on most of the issues I had identified within my practice as needing refinement. And I also feel, this year, that I have a solid structure for operating. It isn’t 100% complete, and I’m sure it will need refining once term starts, but allow me to present my grand pedagogical plan….

(Quick note before I begin: there are similarities between my ideas and those of David Fawcett (@davidfawcett27) in his blog which can be found here. Whilst these are unintentional, I would recommend you read David’s blog at some point. It’s an excellent read).

1) It starts with ‘So that….’ and extends into visible success: This will surprise nobody. I have blogged extensively on this through the holidays and have had dialogue via this blog and Twitter with a couple of people. By taking the time, using Bloom’s Taxonomy, to think through why we are tackling a topic, and how we will know we have succeeded in that topic, I have a really clearly focused plan in the medium term which will allow me to plan day to day lessons easier. As a slight extension to this, I have revisited my medium term plans and started to add in key questions for each topic. David discusses this in his blog, and I have also seen the idea come up in Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ and Lemov’s ‘Teach Like a Champion’

2) The ‘So that…’ forms the basis for a pretest: I can honestly say that of all the blogs I have read this summer, the one I keep going back to the most is William Emeny’s Experiments with Visible Learning (this is the second part of a two part blog by William, so you might like to read part 1 for the context). One of the key issues I had from my teaching last year was about showing parents how much progress their child had made, particularly with the removal of levels. Well, now I have a ready made answer! Students will complete the pretest at the start of the block, I will then teach them the content, provide them with opportunities for revision through homework, and after a couple of weeks post-completion of the content, they will sit the pretest as a post-test. This will allow me, my line manager, parents, and most importantly the students, to see not what they have simply remembered, but what they understand and have committed to long term memory. I will also have the evidence right before my eyes! 

3) Day to day teaching: This is where I get to put all of my summer reading into action. I’ve already mentioned the key questions I will be planning into each topic, but I will also be making much greater use this year of Diagnostic Questions for hinge questions in class. I have created some answer packs (basically 4 cards, each labelled A, B, C and D, paper clipped together) for students to use and will be planning them into lessons on a much greater scale. The beauty of these hinge questions, particularly in Maths is that it is quite easy in many cases to provide convincing incorrect answers, revealing student misconceptions.

I also intend to implement a number of rules taken from Lemov’s ‘Practice Perfect’ – breaking down skills into smaller steps, and having 20% more practice than students need being just two examples. There are a range of resources out there (10 Ticks being one, although there are also a number of websites producing randomly generated worksheets) for this purpose. I also intend to continue, as I did last year, pushing students to use precise and technical language at all times. Teach Like A Champion provides some excellent examples of this.

Most importantly, however, is the need for factual knowledge. I wholeheartedly agree with Willingham that factual knowledge is the basis for skill, and so I aim to include factual questions in starters, in general questioning, and in homeworks, as well as in the pre- and post-tests, obviously. 

 

4) Making the maths explicit: Why Don’t Students Like School? was is an invaluable tool and has had a huge impact on my thinking for the new year. I had begun to consider at the end of last term the need to ‘interleave’ from some of the blogs I had read, and I am glad a now have a scientific back up for this. But equally powerful is the need to make the content explicit. ‘Memory is the residue of thought’ according to Willingham, and I intend to make a huge effort to lead students through at least one practical application of topics where applicable, highlighting where the maths occurs and showing that in all cases, questions can be thought of in purely mathematical terms. 

5) Reflections: This is, as I discussed in my previous post, a key aim for me outside of school (it is something I simply must practice, to avoid falling into the trap of merely being carried along by the busy school term), but I want it to be a huge part of my students’ learning, too. Whilst teaching I intend to ask students to consider why they have chosen a particular method for solving a question, whether there are any alternatives, and so on. And of course, I fully intend to continue using RAG123 with comments, to encourage students to let me know about any issues they may have had at the end of each lesson. 

6) Homework: Alongside assessment, homework is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. I have rarely set it in the past, and I want this year to be different. But I want it to be purposeful, too, not simply for the sake of setting it. A colleague in our department last year gave students an A1 sheet of paper and asked them to complete it on a weekly basis showing the work they had covered in class. This resulted in some excellent examples of student work and is something I intend to try with at least some of my students. In addition, I propose to use homeworks to encourage students to reflect on their learning. I also have a plan to encourage some students to teach topics to their parents, and then invite feedback as to how they did! 

I feel better prepared than perhaps ever before. I have a clear vision of how I intend this year to go. All I need now are some students! 

How I spent my summer – and how it will help me in 2014-15

With a week of the holidays left, it’s time to focus my efforts fully on the return to work and the new academic year. I must say I’m really pleased with the use of the summer break – I’ve spent time with my wife on holiday, but as well as planning for the new term, I’ve also spent a large amount of time reading all the educational books I’d purchased but hadn’t yet got round to reading, or finishing the ones I had started. The designation of ‘reading days’ allowed me to complete a book in a day on occasions, and at time of writing, I only have ‘Teach Like a Champion’ and the corresponding Field Guide left to read – all 800 or so pages!

As the summer has progressed, I’ve built up a greater idea of how I intend things to work over 2014-15, both at school and outside. I seem to have built up through the holiday a series of principles:

More – I realise my lessons can be improved by having much more: more purpose, more content (ensuring EVERY moment is utilised), more depth (rather than breadth), more organisation, more planning (short, medium, and long term), more challenge, more independence from students, and more student talk/discussion. Outside of lessons, more focus on my job and its roles (see below).

Less – This has been a huge revelation for me lately. One of the books I read, not particularly for educational reasons but just for a bit of general interest, was The Art of Thinking Clearly by Ralf Dobelli. In it, he talks about common cognitive biases that we all fall victim to on a regular basis. The final bias presented is ‘The New Illusion’. Dobelli’s advice is to ignore the news, and let friends and family be your news filters. I have given this a go, and can honestly say I have already felt the benefits. I am spending much less time (no time at all, in fact) reading BBC news, watching rolling news channels, or scrolling Twitter repeatedly for news. In fact, I’ve even stopped following BBC News and other similar accounts on Twitter. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. Much of the news is completely irrelevant to my day to day life. Of course, there will be things that I would benefit from knowing, but that information will reach me in due course, and I can investigate it as and when I need to. 

Allied to this, I have also made a conscious decision to step back from those things over which I have little or no influence, and this includes school matters. It is a waste of my time or energy getting worked up about things I cannot change. Far more constructive for me (and my students) that I focus completely on what I am responsible for. This will also simplify my Twitter usage. Blogs about the role of SLT are now not relevant, irrespective of whether I might agree with the content or not. Articles about implementing a growth mindset culture are relevant to a point – I can control the use of growth mindset in my classrooms, but not beyond that. It’s time to be ruthless. 

Selfishness – this is connected to the above points. I have, over past years, tried to be a teacher who goes above and beyond the call of duty to help others. In the short term, at least, my focus has to be on my teaching and my students, and whilst still remaining friendly and pleasant, I can no longer afford to help others to the detriment of myself. 

Reflection – I have this year built in reflection time each evening when I get home. This is something I picked up from reading Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ I have a teacher diary on my desk, which will be completed each evening. In addition, I also envisage more frequent, shorter posts about my day on this blog, alongside occasional longer features such as this and my earlier posts this summer. 

 

My next blog will focus on specific issues around planning. And will, as usual, will include requests for help!

Visible success – developments

This is likely to be my last post on this topic before the start of term, but as I had promised to update you on how things were going, I thought I’d share this. 

Following post 3 (here) I revisited my existing plans and tried to update as much as possible with explicit success criteria. Where I have added and amended what I had before post 3, it is marked in red and underlined (as ‘Track Changes’). Anything else has been added since that post:

I will admit it has been easier to do for some topics than others, but at this early stage I guess that is only to be expected. The thing that has really surprised me (and excited me at the same time) is that I think it has led to increased creativity as I have thought about how students will show success. I will freely admit to being rather uncreative, and maybe it is this method of planning that has awakened my creativity. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the 2nd diagram (or top right, depending on how it is displayed) in the WAL sections ‘About 3D shapes’ and ‘How to show a 3D shape in 2D’. Because I had all of the ‘So That’ column filled in, I could see very quickly a link between the two which would allow students to produce one final, overarching piece of work (the report) which would satisfy all of the ‘So That’ criteria. My idea at this stage is that students will take a 3D shape and then prepare an expert’s report on it, meeting all the criteria set out. This then would seem to lend itself nicely to some peer teaching….! Added to this, and to my complete surprise, what was initially intended to help clarify outcomes and the assessment thereof has begun to take care of my lesson planning in some cases! What an unexpected bonus!

I don’t think I have much more to offer on this topic at this time. It is now a case of trying it out with students and seeing how it all works. But I would, as ever, welcome any feedback/comments/suggestions that you might have. This has been an interesting couple of days for me – I feel that at last I have finally ‘arrived’ in terms of blogging and tweeting teachers, and I am proud of the fact that I have finally been able to contribute something that many people have found at least interesting, and maybe even useful! 

My next blog(s) are likely to be a look back over this summer and a look forward to how my reading is going to inform my practice in the new term.

In the meantime, thanks for reading

Alex

What success looks like – further thoughts and reflections

In my original post (which can be found here) in this particular sequence on Wednesday, I posed three questions:

1) It is necessary to plan for what success looks like?

2) Is this even possible over one or two lessons?  

3) If the answer to both of the above is yes, what are the best/most effective ways of doing this?

I then followed this up later in the day with some initial thoughts, but it was very stream of consciousness stuff, and not very well developed. Having had further time to reflect, however, I think I have a much more reasoned response to the initial questions. 

One of my guiding principles as a teacher is ‘It’s not about me, it’s about them’. When I applied it to this situation, it makes sense that we should be planning for what success looks like – but it is possible to fall into a trap here (of which I myself might have been guilty). If we ask ‘What will/does success look like?’, we neglect the important issue of from whose viewpoint? If we focus on the students, and remind ourselves that we are framing our lessons in the ‘So That’ way to enable them to see clearly what it is they will achieve, then we need THEM to see HOW they will be successful at a certain criterion. In other words, the ‘So That’ deals with WHY we are learning, and the ‘Success looks like’ deals with ‘HOW’ this will be done. The alternative approach is to see the ‘Success looks like….’ as a criterion for us as teachers – which I think is what I was getting at in my second post. 

My thinking then shifted to my completed and previously shared examples – if we are letting the students know what success looks like, is it sufficient to give them an example of a question they should answer? This, I think, is as far as my thinking has got, as I do not yet have a clear answer to this point. However, a quick scroll through my ‘favourite-d’ Tweets (effectively bookmarks) threw up, as I hoped, two posts that I think are of some use and, if I’m honest, were probably subconsciously there all along. The first is this blog post from @dan_brinton which discusses, in particular, ‘Developing quality success criteria’. In my notes for this blog (I had the idea late last night, so made notes so I wouldn’t forget!) I have used the word explicit – we should be aiming to be as explicit as possible in showing students what success looks like. 

So examples could include:

• “So that we can identify parts of a circle” becomes “to show success, you will be able to label a circle with correct diameter/radius/chord….”
• “So that we can solve equations” might become “to show success, you will be able to find the value of y when 3(y+2) = 8(y-3)
• “So that we can classify shapes based on their properties” might involve a display of 12 objects grouped in 2 or 3 different ways based on different criteria

The second useful Tweet I found (or rather rediscovered) is this picture from @TeachHeath, which I first came across in April but was reposted overnight. You can see clearly here the why (So I can/So that) and then the ‘Success looks like’ (here phrased slightly differently). It is not quite as explicit as I have proposed here, and indeed is maybe closer to my original attempts (i.e. you will be able to answer a question like this). If we are making the how explicit, are we not building in peer assessment to every lesson? By having explicit ‘hows’ available, students can see clearly what they are expected to achieve an crucially, whether or not they have achieved it. This in turn will make them more reflective learners, which will help with RAG123 assessment too! 

I can honestly say that this week has been a total revelation for me in terms of my teaching and Twitter – not only in terms of the discussion generated in relation to my initial post, but also through a number of the blogs, Tweets and articles I’ve read. The Dan Brinton post mentioned above was definitely worth another read generally, not just for the reasons I outlined above, but of equal value is this post highlighted in Damian Benney’s post here. The main thing I took away from Damian’s post is that by and large it describes my approach (or rather, my intended approach for the new school year) to teaching almost perfectly. There seems to be a consensus developing about using research literature (Practice Perfect, Why Don’t Students Like School?’, Mindset, An Ethic of Excellence, etc…) I intend to blog about my plans for the coming year in a bit more detail over the next couple of weeks, but what has struck me is that this is a fantastic time to be a teacher. Can you imagine how much poorer we and our students would be without Twitter and blogs to spread ideas such as So That and RAG123? 

Showing the success – a possible solution?

I’m pleased to have resonated with a few people through my last post. I’ve had some positive comments via Twitter and this has led me to following a few people, as well as gaining a few followers. And through this, I might have found at least one answer to the key question I posed earlier: how might we show success in lessons?

A retweet from @PaulGarvey4, which he himself had retweeted from @WillGourley, and which he had retweeted from @ijukes, led me to see this:

 (see here)

On first glance, I regarded it an alternative way for students to complete homework. But a second glance suggested that it wasn’t solely intended for homework, but for class activities too. And then something clicked in my mind:

Isn’t the way for students to show that they have succeeded in ‘So That’ criteria X simply getting them to use/demonstrate that skill within the next level of Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Examples:

• A student will show that they know what a diameter is, if they can show a diameter on a diagram of a circle
• A student will show that they understand the formula for area of a circle by applying this to calculate the area of the centre circle of a football pitch
• A student will show that they can apply the formulae for area of various shapes by analysing an exam question and finding the deliberate mistake

And so on…..

As I write this, I’m still not sure – if students are moving up to skill level 3 to show they can accomplish skill level 2, don’t we want to be pushing them again? The original picture definitely had the feel of getting students to do an activity that pushed them on a level – but maybe I’ve got it completely wrong.

As ever, thoughts/opinions most welcome!

Summer 2014, post 1 – planning

Anyone who follows me on Twitter might know I’ve spent much of the summer being quite constructive (relatively speaking!) and have read a few influential educational texts. Now we’re on the downward slide towards the new term, my thoughts have turned increasingly to planning for 2014-15, keen and eager to put in to practice much of what I have picked up over the last few weeks. 

Most of my reading, however, has been about how to teach, not what to teach. And so I have returned for my planning to some old tweets to help give me a bit of a push. I reread Zoe Elder’s post about ‘So That…’ learning (which you can find here) which I have been using for a while. But I wonder if it can be extended, and if so, how (I am far better at raising questions that providing solutions, clearly!). With some trepidation, and to give you a better idea of what I mean, allow me to share two of my planning documents:

Outcomes and objectives – SO THAT

This is my first attempt. This is for a year 11 class, so we are starting the year by going over topics they have covered in some depth, but which need going over again. You will notice that there is no duration specified, although most of the topics (SOHCAHTOA being the notable exception) I would expect to cover easily within 2 lessons. I have made much more of an effort this year to incorporate Bloom’s Taxonomy into my ‘So That….’/outcomes, and you will also see for one entry in that column, I have including an italicised ‘So That’ at the bottom. This is an attempt to show transferability of what we are doing in class – I found it difficult for this class, as their year is geared around their exams, and quite simply for many of the topics I am not sure what I could put there anyway.

Where I believe I have tried to extend Zoe’s idea is in the far right column, by talking about what ‘Success will look like….’ This is a tricky area I think, certainly for me. A quick glimpse through some of my bookmarked Tweets from others found this post from WIlliam Emeny, and this follow up, which although containing fantastic ideas in their own right (which I will be trialling myself), didn’t really fully address the issue I was trying to deal with. You can see very clearly what has happened – I have fallen into the habit of ‘success by correct answer’ in many cases, with a slightly different take on the Pythagoras issue.

Not ideal.

I then decided to try with another group – my new year 7 class. Here is their version of the same document:

Outcomes and objectives – SO THAT 7Mt1

You can see one difference, in as much as I have included much more transferable skill in the ‘So That’ column, which I am pleased with. But the final column is still much the same, largely uninspiring and unimaginative, although there are signs of development in a couple of the rows. 

So, I would like to pose the following questions and generate a bit of a discussion:

1) It is necessary to plan for what success looks like?

2) Is this even possible over one or two lessons? (Here is where William’s second post I think is useful – I suspect the answer is no for the reasons he outlines regarding long term and working memory, but I am interested to know how others feel) 

3) If the answer to both of the above is yes, what are the best/most effective ways of doing this? I clearly do not know the answer, and if anyone has any views, I’d love it if they would share them via the comments box below or on Twitter.

All views/ideas most welcome!

Teacher goals (or a plea for help)

I have on my office wall a sheet of A4 paper with my goals on for the year. At the end of last year I typed them out and stuck the sheet on my wall, so that I felt I had some purpose to my life. Anyone who knows me would guess quite clearly that these were my goals: there are running related goals, financial goals, and even a goal relating to my ongoing research of my family tree lineage. 

And there, at the top of the list, is my one and only teaching goal: “To become an outstanding teacher”.

Now, this was written, as I say, before the New Year, when I was a slave to the grade. In the intervening period, much has changed with regard to lesson grading (i.e. it has effectively been killed off). I have reconciled myself with the fact that I will NOT be observed as outstanding, because such a conclusion of my teaching, and of my students’ learning, is not possible from a single lesson observation. 

But the goal has remained, and the fact it hasn’t yet been removed is partly due to the fact I don’t know what to replace it with. Because I don’t think teaching is as clear cut as the other areas of my life I have mentioned.

My other goals have pretty clear measurement. I can see how much I have in my savings account. I can see how fast I can run a 10k, or a half marathon. I can see my family tree building before my eyes. 

Yet in my day job, the one thing for which I am paid, and to which I dedicate the majority of my waking hours, I can’t think of a single goal that I can easily measure which I can solely and easily control. Indeed, in the ‘to be measured by’ column of my goal setting sheet, my teaching goal simply contained the word ‘observation’. That’s no good at all! Even before the shift in thinking, it was never going to be good enough. Now, it is certainly redundant.

With my other goals, I have a plan. I know, for example, that training two or three times a week will bring me closer towards my 10k goal. I may not reach it until my last opportunity for the year in September (indeed, I may not reach it at all), but I have already seen progress this year in bringing my time down by almost two minutes. I know, too, that I am reaching my savings target, because I can see the balance of my savings account increasing month after month. 

But I am really struggling to put together a goal for my teaching in the same vein. I know that writing this at this time of year is probably not the best time, and that teacher goals are perhaps best set in September, but I want to pick the collective brains that read this to ask:

• are teacher goals possible?
• what examples are you aware of/have you worked towards in the past?
• how are/were the measured?

I would be really grateful for feedback, either left here or directly on Twitter.

Thanks in advance!