Teaching Strategies: Addressing Misconceptions & Feedback for Writing Growth, Exercises of Religion

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TEACHING & LEARNING HANDBOOK

INTRODUCTION

I’m regularly asked: ‘what about the

child who is completely “unmotivated”;

who just doesn’t want to learn anything?’

My answer is that that child doesn’t exist.

There are kids who don’t want to learn

particular things, in particular settings,

and there are those who don’t find it easy

to learn some things in some settings; but

the generally lazy child who doesn’t want

to learn anything is a myth. What the

questioner actually means is: ‘They don’t

want to learn what I want them to learn,

when I want them to learn it, in the way

I want them to learn it.’

Guy Claxton

INTRODUCTION TEACHING & LEARNING PLEDGE TO OUR STUDENTS

FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE

As our mission statement says, our aim is to help prepare you – our students – for future success. We mean success in the broadest sense: whether that be academic, economic, or in your personal and social lives. When you leave us in seven years you will enter into an exciting but demanding world. To meet the competitive demands of universities and employers you will need to perform at your very best. That much is obvious – but what does excellent performance look like in 2014? Or 2019? As your teachers we keep the words of Seymour Papert below at the front of our minds:

“There is only one twenty first century skill: the

ability to act intelligently when you are faced

with a situation for which you have not been

specifically prepared.”

Seymour Papert, Professor Emeritus at MIT The uncertainty of 21st Century life means that, to thrive, you will need to be ready to enjoy challenging situations, and able to meet them calmly, confidently and creatively. We know that in the UK today there are many young people who can’t do this and who are struggling to cope. We don’t want that to happen to any of you. If you turn up, join in and give 100%, we will do everything in our power to give you that confidence and capability. The qualities we value are written below; we will do all we can to help you develop these:

• curiosity;
• embracing a challenge;
• resilience;
• resourcefulness;
• concentration;
• imagination;
• questioning;
• clear thinking;
• self-awareness;
• thoughtfulness;
• self-evaluation;
• independence;
• team spirit;
• empathy;

INTRODUCTION To achieve this, we need order and routine. But, given that, we will always strive to value these qualities over simple, ‘good behaviour’. Also this list is provisional – we will develop it over time and we expect your input.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

At KAA, we want to develop the business and social entrepreneurs of the future. We’re lucky to have Sir Rod Aldridge, our namesake, a world famous entrepreneur and a founding school Governor, to help us to achieve this. We don’t expect you all to follow this path – only those who want to – but we expect you all to have the opportunity to. Entrepreneurs create wealth and employment, and that is important to us. There are three elements which make our school entrepreneurial:

• Excellent academic qualifications for all, including ‘technical’ subjects such as maths, science, computer science and product design, and subjects that teach you to be effective communicators such as English, history, geography and languages.
• An entrepreneurial, can-do spirit that is fundamental to all that we do – lessons, enrichment, the house system – everything. This is what Intrepidus is all about!
• Valuable entrepreneurial experiences for all of you during your seven years with us, such as our Industry Days and Kensington Creates Club. Entrepreneur is originally a French word which means, ‘to start’. We’d like all of you to be people who can start things, and change the world for the better. This quote is important to us – what does it mean to you?

“Some see things as they are and ask, why?

Others dream things that never were, and ask,

why not?”

George Bernard Shaw

PARTNERSHIP

To achieve our goals we need your help and help from your parents. Creating this school is a big commitment for us, and it is quite a demanding one. All of us are prepared to put in the hours it takes to help you achieve the best results. We need to see a similar effort from you. We also need to know what you really want from KAA; how we could make our list of qualities above more precise and relevant to you; and how we could be more effective in helping you to strengthen them. We want your help to keep us on track and to get better. We promise to be as open with you as we can be about what we are trying to do, what we are thinking, and to take your thoughts and ideas seriously.

INTRODUCTION

THE SCHOOL ETHOS

Fine words and good intentions – like the ones in this pledge – are no use if they do not filter down into all the everyday details of school life. We have to show that we are remembering our pledge, in detail, in everything we do and say. If we don’t, you won’t believe we are serious. So, to prove to you how serious we are, we will change the way we talk to you about your learning ; the way we mark work; the displays we put up on the walls; the resources we make available to you; the amount we trust you to join in making significant decisions about your education (and not just about vending machines and toilets); the way we write reports about you; what we do in assemblies and tutor time; how we involve you in the house system and entrepreneurial activity, and a dozen other aspects of school life as you experience it.

MODELLING

We don’t believe that you will develop confidence and capability as learners unless you are continually surrounded by people who are learning. So we expect everyone in the school to do their best to be role models of openness, curiosity and non-defensiveness. That includes all the teaching and non-teaching staff, all the governors, all the parents and other adults who come into the school, and you yourselves, especially in your dealings with students younger than you. No one at KAA should ever be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand.’ Your teachers will make an effort to tell you about what and how they are learning, and their struggles and mistakes.

TEACHING

We believe that teaching is more about helping you get better at finding and figuring things out, and less about telling you ‘stuff’ and asking you to memorise it. Our job is to let you do more and more of your own learning. As you get more and more confident and capable, so we will need to do less and less telling. From now on, ‘good teaching’ is not about handing over knowledge to you to get you through the exams. It is about helping you take control of your own learning, so you will be able to learn whatever you will need to, throughout your lives. This is what makes us truly entrepreneurial. An entrepreneur is someone who finds solutions to problems and who never stops learning. Teachers will help you look for ways in which the qualities you are developing in school can be useful in business and the outside world – and vice versa. During your education, you need to build up knowledge of course, but knowledge on its own is not enough.You need to be able to think and act flexibly with the knowledge you have been given; to critique it, connect it and use it to create new knowledge. If you can do this, you will be ready for the challenges of the 21st Century we described above.

SUBJECTS

Different subjects stretch and develop different ‘learning muscles’. A scientist’s questioning is not the same as an artist’s. Evidence in history is not the same as in English. Each of the subjects we teach has grown out of man and woman’s desire to understand the world around them and each subject has certain rules and ways of thinking that you need to understand. We don’t believe in ‘core’ subjects as no one subject is more important than another.You should always know why and how lessons are contributing to the development of your ability to face real-life challenges with confidence.

INTRODUCTION

PARENTS

We need your parents’ help with this. If we are going to be more successful at helping you face the future – whatever your particular future may bring – with confidence, we have to have their support. We want them to get their heads around what we are trying to do, and to ask questions, make suggestions, and debate with us. We know that there are lots of ways of discouraging parents from being involved with school, for example only bothering to contact them when there is a problem. We will try our best not to let that happen. Instead, we want your parents to play a central role in your education. Please do what you can to convince your parents that it is important for them to get involved. Especially if they did not get a lot from school, they need to know that KAA is a very different proposition…

INTRODUCTION excellence in all other areas of school life: attainment, progress, behaviour, attendance, our wider culture and ethos and more. To achieve this level of consistency we need a model; a framework for teachers to follow and refer back to. This is not a prescriptive approach – we do not expect KAA teachers’ lessons to be formulaic or repetitive. Instead the ideas in the model provide a stimulus and support for our planning. We hope the structures here are liberating, not limiting. This document is deliberately not called a ‘policy’ – instead it is a handbook and training manual to be drawn upon by every teacher in daily practice. It is not something to read during staff induction and then to pick one or two ‘nice’ activities to try out in September. It is intended to be read and re-read, annotated, with key pages photocopied and stuck on your wall. Use it when you are writing a scheme of work, planning a lesson, designing a training session. Don’t leave it on the shelf unused. It is a manual, not a thesis!

INTRODUCTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• • The curriculum @ KAA: An introduction CURRICULUM PLANNING
• • The Five Principles
• • Stage 1 The Teaching and Learning Cycle
• • Stage 2 Surface, Deep and Conceptual Understanding
• • Stage 3 Work Out the Whole Game
• • Stage 4 Performance of Understanding – Evidence of Thinking
• • Stage 5 Disciplines and Expertise
• • Stage 6 Fertile Questions – Planning for ProgressionThe Learner Profile
• • Stage 7 The Learner Profile
• • Conclusions on Curriculum Planning and KAA Examples
• • Introduction and Key Terminology PLANNING FOR LANGUAGE PROGRESSION
• • Classroom Talk
• • Writing
• • Reading
• • Framing Lessons Objectives LESSON PLANNING
• • The Four Part Lesson
  • – The Connection Phase
  • – The Activation Phase
  • – The Demonstration Phase
  • – The Consolidation Phase
• • Questioning
• • Modelling
• • List of footnotes

13 PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING

PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING THE CURRICULUM @ KAA – AN INTRODUCTION A common misconception is that outstanding teaching is just about pedagogy – the strategies and techniques that the teacher uses in each lesson. This idea is seductive but ultimately false. Truly outstanding results only occur if the underlying curriculum delivers the powerful learning experiences which students need to achieve a mature understanding within each subject (and therefore the highest possible grades). So this handbook focuses equally on curriculum planning and lesson planning ; it is the curriculum which each department in KAA chooses to follow that will determine our success, as much as delivery of that curriculum.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUBJECTS

The quote from Seymour Pappert in our Teaching & Learning Pledge captures the world we must prepare our students for. Being able to memorise formulaic answers and rehearse them is near useless in 2014 – a 21st Century education must provide students with much more than this. There is a danger, however, of going too far the other way and concluding that facts and subject knowledge have no place in a world where you can find any information you need in seconds on the internet. It’s fashionable now to ask, ‘if we have Google why do we need subjects? Pupils just need the skills to find the information.’ This question stems from a mistaken view that teaching academic subjects is merely about providing information, rather than about developing forms of disciplinary thinking. A quote from Christine Counsell sums this up nicely:

“The view that disciplines can neither engage nor serve most pupils

often betrays two misapprehensions: first, an assumption that a

subject equates to information, as opposed to knowledge; second,

a lack of awareness that a school subject such as history has long

involved the active and engaging exploration of the structure and

form of that knowledge, using concepts and attendant processes.”

1 At KAA we are conscious we have a rare opportunity to create a brand new school which has the highest expectations of students and staff, and can deliver the best possible results. As such, we’ve looked carefully at what research says makes schools most effective. Until recently, many schools have been encouraged to focus more and more on generic ‘thinking-skills’. This approach ignores Counsell’s point above – that academic disciplines serve a distinctive purpose which a skills based curriculum will never be able to address. Disciplines are not sets of ‘skills’ so much as distinctive ways of building knowledge, weighing evidence and finding truth. This is a fundamental part of the way we plan to teach subjects at KAA. As teachers here we are first and foremost specialists in our subjects, and we must use our own disciplines to teach students how to think in particular, powerful ways. KAA teachers know the particular disciplinary context of a

PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING students to access information from source documents; “reasoning skills” – important for thinking originally and creatively about the significance of new subject content.” 3 It is clear to see that there is nothing here that will develop deep or conceptual understandings, and that information and knowledge are seen as one and the same thing. Students may well be learning to handle information but they are not learning to interrogate it and ask questions the way an expert in a disciplinary field might. Because at no stage are students engaged in disciplinary thinking they cannot be said to be developing expertise in any one discipline, and are simply using their everyday ideas to discuss general statements. Below is an alternative, and more powerful, version of this projection that leads to both deep and conceptual understandings.

OPTION 2: SUBJECT LED

Let’s stick with Y7 and the Roman Empire. Firstly we need to decide on the disciplinary or conceptual focus – in this instance we could look at the concept of empathy. Empathy here does not mean pretending to be someone else, but instead “the central idea here is that people in the past did not share our way of looking at the world…thus empathy…is the understanding of past institutions, social practices or actions as making sense in light of the way people saw things.” 4 We then need to i) connect the different subjects through the deeper understanding they can give to the concept of empathy and ii) help students to see that the concept takes on different meanings as it crosses disciplinary thresholds. A way of achieving this could be to look at Leptis Magna, an ancient Roman city in Libya, as an expression of imperial thought and power – the way the Romans used art and the built environment as an expression of imperial greatness and higher culture. In art, we would study how the Romans used art to express their wealth and power, their use of depth and perspective to create meaning and as a way of displaying their cultural superiority. In history, we would look at the psychology of the art as an expression of power and an attempt at realising hegemony , interrogating the source material we find to say how people at the time might have seen things and reconstructing these beliefs based on what the evidence does and does not tell us – a key difference from using ‘research skills’ to access ‘information’. In geography we would look at perception – how did different people experience the empire (directly or indirectly) and how did they communicate this experience? This would then culminate in a performance of understanding that would require students to use their deepening knowledge of the concept of empathy to either criticise or create something new. Hopefully this example illustrates the difference between a skills-based curriculum and one that sees subjects as separate disciplines with their own concepts and principles which students need to master. Though both examples focus on the same ‘content area’, option 1 remains inert and simply provides surface information with little deep learning, while option 2 tries to induct students into an ‘apprenticeship in thinking’ through looking at the same event through different disciplinary lenses. A final point is that ‘thinking-skills’ are often presented as a useful set of tools to solve problems, without any reference to context of the problem at hand. Apparently, you simply encounter a problem, choose the right ‘skill’, deploy it, and the problem is solved and you move on. The ‘thinking-skills’ approach is flawed, in that it sees the brain as a toolbox, and every problem as falling into a preconceived set of ‘boxes’ that map onto

17 PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING the tools provided. The approach has led to a cottage industry of suppliers publishing materials which will have little impact on students’ understanding of proper academic subjects, and on their success in these subjects at GCSE and A-Level (particularly now these exams have been made more academically rigorous). For us at KAA this links strongly with our focus on reading and literacy – in a skills based curriculum students are only encouraged to read de-contextualised snippets of texts and this is unlikely to make them lifelong readers!

DISCIPLINED THINKING

So, at KAA we believe that academic subjects, and their specific ways of thinking, talking, writing and knowing, are not bodies of information to be found on a website; they are constructed and contested forms of knowledge that have come about through our desire to understand the world around us. All KAA teachers need to have a firm grasp of how academic subjects develop thinking and empower our students to achieve the very best results.We must all be able to plan for this kind of progression. It’s worth stating that, just because we believe in the importance of traditional subjects, it doesn’t mean there is anything especially ‘traditional’ about our teaching. This is because we don’t think of our subject as simply a canon of knowledge (information) to be imparted and committed to memory. Instead we know KAA students need to be active learners, who discuss, question and operate on the knowledge they are given in class; who connect it with other knowledge they have and use it to form new ideas. It’s possible to promote the integrity of subjects as disciplines without arguing that students should be passive vessels , whose heads we fill up with facts and information that they can then recite back to us. A discipline- based approach is questioning , critical and active. It is entrepreneurial. It has to be, because to engage with a discipline is to engage with how knowledge is constructed in the first place. You may have heard a lot in the press recently about the impressive results of the Singapore education system, or why Chinese maths students consistently outperform their UK and US counterparts. Their success is sometimes explained by the different ways these students’ languages operate, or cultural factors to do with work-ethic and the values families place on education. In fact the answer is simpler – in these education systems there is an emphasis placed on disciplinary thinking and the role of concepts in shaping and developing meaning. For example, in China maths teachers have a very clear grasp of the fundamental concepts that underpin the subject of maths, and their curriculum is built around these concepts. They are then in turn able to teach these conceptual understandings in a way that enables students to apply their learning to a range of unseen problems – proof that they have a deep understanding. We hope that by encouraging KAA students to wrestle with ‘grown-up’, complex, academic ideas from a young age, and immersing them within a range of different subject disciplines, we will support them towards the excellent academic qualifications they will need to progress to VIth form and university. In case anyone needed convincing why a university education is so important in the 21st Century, these statistics offer a powerful reminder:

19 PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING

THE CHALLENGE OF 21ST CENTURY EDUCATION

7 19th / 20th Century assumptions 21st Century assumptions 8 Intelligence is perceived as unitary, fixed and innate Intelligence is understood as multi-faceted, plastic and [to a certain extent] learnable Learning is the acquisition of subject content. Students are consumers of knowledge Students as producers, not just consumers of knowledge. Learning focus on application of knowledge Curriculum focuses on content coverage and behavioural objectives Curriculum focuses on processes of learning to learn, metacognition and flexible, critical thinking Information and knowledge focus Information literacy. Leaning to handle information is the focus Education is limited to the school and for fixed periods Education is lifelong and unconstrained in time and place Teaching and learning roles are sharply defined and segregated. School is a place with clear rigid boundaries. School like a factory School as a network and part of a broader web Roles are blurred and overlapping Schools and teachers are autonomous Schools and teachers are embedded in complex interconnected relationships Local, National and International focus Local, National and global focus Schools prepare for lifelong employment in one future occupation Students identities and destinies are fluid and changing

“A generation ago, teachers could expect that

what they taught would last their students a

lifetime. Today, because of rapid economic

and social change, schools have to prepare

students for jobs that have not yet been created,

technologies that have not yet been invented and

problems that we don’t yet know will arise.”

Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate. The case for 21st century learning.

PART I – CURRICULUM PLANNING In this important study, the OECD considered the kind of education schools should provide in the 21st Century. They proposed that students should be introduced to:

• new ways of thinking : including creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making;
• new ways of working : including new forms of collaboration and communication;
• using new tools for working : including the capacity to harness the potential of new technologies.

“Success will go to those individuals and

countries that are swift to adapt, slow to resist

and open to change. The task of educators

and policymakers is to help countries rise to

this challenge.”

Schleicher op cit It is in reaction to studies like this that generic frameworks of vaguely linked skills and competencies were created. The problem is that, as argued above, teaching ‘critical’ or ‘higher-order thinking skills’ cannot be divorced from teaching academic subjects. Maths, science, history, geography – these are not dry information-gathering exercises that won’t develop the creativity, critical thinking and problem solving the 21st Century economy demands. They are fields of research and debate that have their own language, rules and modes of discourse, which, through studying, enable students to understand the world around them, and then develop that understanding in others. It may be true that schools have, to some extent, taught subjects in a dry way in the past; viewing them as bodies of information to be consumed and committed to memory. If this was the only way to teach subjects then it may be a good idea to discard geography or English and teach a series of thematic projects instead. There is nothing engaging, motivating or real-world relevant about learning all the capital cities of the world off by heart – but this is not what we mean at KAA by ‘teaching academic subjects’. Instead we propose a disciplinary approach based on conceptual understandings – an approach which lifts academic subjects off the mundane plains of information-gathering and up into the ambitious heights of critical thinking and analysis – with all the complexities of thought that universities and employers want. As such, we think our KAA curriculum is genuinely fit for purpose in the 21st Century.