A toolbox to help start your term

UPDATED JAN 2014. - Adding in #RAG123 info and updating download data.

I've posted at various points over the last few months about using common formats, excel sheets or tools to help make some aspects of day to day teaching easier. It's not about making everyone's teaching the same, it's about giving a basically good structure to help save time and allow outstanding teaching to flourish around it. A background to this philosophy can be found here in my very first post.

I thought it might be useful to collect the main bits together in one place with a bit of commentary, and I've also shared publicly a couple of the formats that I've not shared previously... Realise this is a bit of a clip show of a post, but hopefully it is also useful.

Transform your marking with #RAG123
Counter-intuitive it may be, but marking more often really can reduce your workload and have real value for students. I can't emphasise enough how much impact this has had on my day to day teaching and also helping to manage my workload. Powerpoint explaining the key points can be found in this post.

Seating plans
Seating plans are deceptively powerful and can be used as an assessment and monitoring tool as well as a way to manage behaviour. However the more data you put in the harder it is to change the plan at a later date - this is a tool to help with that... In this post I explained the thinking behind this sheet - basically it allows you to create and modify seating plans easily and include useful bits of student data at the same time.

The proforma is here. (over 800 downloads on TES as of Jan 2014)

Markbook and feedback proforma
The process behind creating this sheet is explained in this post - the resource is a feedback sheet that has been used in my department to transform the quality of feedback & marking, as described in this post.

I've not shared the proforma before, but it's now available for download here. (downloaded over 400 times on TES as of Jan 2014)

Formats for giving summative tests/assessment formative impact.
As discussed in this post and this post I really value testing in my department, but it's got to be about more than just grades and levels. The following resource allows analysis of any exam, assessment or test. I've even used it in the past to give feedback to book marking but that's been superseded by the feedback proforma above. I find this type of analysis really powerful and the students at our school also find them useful.

I've not shared this widely before, but again it's now available for download here. (downloaded over 150 times on TES as of Jan 2014)

Regular testing followed by good analysis and formative feedback has resulted in our department posting a second consecutive record year of results at GCSE. This year was the first time ever that the school's maths results passed 70% A*-C, with an overall figure of 76.8%. You can see how regular mocks and feedback led to improvement in the graph that tracked our progress during the year...

Prompts for questioning linked to SOLO
This has been one of my most popular posts ever, and the resource has been downloaded on TES over 360 times as of Jan 2014. You can find the sheet here.

Other SOLO resources can be seen here.

Sharing learning objectives with KS5
Sometimes I find it difficult to share learning objectives in a meaningful way with KS5 students - I've found this format useful as explained in this post. The format for the logs can be found here. (over 70 downloads as of Jan 2014).

Make yourself some promises for the start of term
As a HoD or as a classroom teacher it is good to take a few moments to reflect and make yourself some promises. I've explained the thinking behind the formats in this post, and the documents themselves are available here. (over 130 downloads as of Jan 2014).

Other tips to help this year to be better than the next
1) Get on twitter... why? see this post...
2) Do something different in your classroom - here are some ideas
3) If you want something to improve - find a good way to measure it an make it visible - as explained here.
4) Run a departmental open day - you'll get way more from it that you might expect. Details on our first ever one can be found here.

I hope that this coming academic year will be good to you and your students - if you have any other good ideas please do share them.

Making resolutions for the new academic year

Was thinking earlier and this idea popped into my head... Thought it worth writing up - will blog again about how it goes once I've tried it...

Making resolutions
In recent weeks I've seen various people on twitter/blogs talking about making promises for the coming academic year, such as @HoDTeacher, @magicalmaths, @TeacherToolkit, and there are bound to be more that I've not spotted.

I got thinking about what I wanted to resolve and started scribbling down some headings that I wanted to sort them under (yes my mind really does work that way!!). The headings I came up with were:

• Something to continue doing
• Something to stop doing
• Something to start doing
• Something to take a risk on
• Something to improve
• Something to enjoy
• Something to persevere with

To make all of these changes it occurred to me that I might need some help, so I added some categories for help too (segregated between school and home) - more below...

When I looked at the headings and the sheet I'd scribbled out I realised that I could use the same basic sheet in 3 linked but different ways.

Resolutions for departmental planning
At the start of an academic year (and again at the start of each term) I lay out the priorities for the department and link that to the actions we are taking and are going to take. I try to make this a two way discussion, and to help that this year alongside sharing the priorities I am going to ask the team to help me to fill in this sheet for the department:

I envisage a post it note & prioritisation activity to help decide the various inputs. I then plan to put it up on the wall in our resource base and refer to it in departmental meetings as the term progresses.  (A link for a word version of this file is given at the bottom of this post)

Personal resolutions
Some of my team reflect and plan for themselves as a matter of course, while others need a bit more coaxing. To help structure this for the whole team I am also going to ask them all to complete this subtly different version for themselves.

Importantly I am going to encourage the team to ensure that their responses do not all need to be school related (we've all got lives outside). I've also changed the help section a little to recognise that we may need help from people outside of school. I will encourage the team to put these sheets in their planners for reference during the term, and if they are willing I'd like to take a copy of theirs too, but I'm not planning on forcing this (I want copies only because I might need to arrange the help they need and it could help plan CPD for the department).

(A link for a word version of this file is given at the bottom of this post)

Student resolutions
After doing all of this it occurred to me that I could use something like this as a start of year activity with my tutor group, which I can then use during the year for mentoring. I might yet use it with some of my maths classes too. I tweaked it to make a student version (note I took out the "take a risk" row - thought it could be contentious!):

Hope they are useful
Word versions of all these documents are available for download here.

As always - all comments/thoughts welcome.

Some pieces of paper are more important than others

I think I've started to write this post or something like it about 5 times, but I either scrap it or it becomes something else during writing. It's done it again to some extent, and the message I thought I'd sat down to write about was very different to the final post that I've just re-read. That's one of the fascinating things about writing a blog - you think you have this amazing, powerful argument for something groundbreaking and then you write it down to realise it's a bit of a generic rant. Hopefully this has turned into something more worthwhile in the writing!

An old assembly
After finishing my A-levels I did a year out in industry before going to University. As part of the training I did during this year I went back to one of my old schools to do an assembly for the students about to start their GCSEs.

The assembly went roughly like this:

I held up a £10 note and asked the students what I was holding - obviously they all said "ten pounds" (hardly a challenge). We then got into a bit of a discussion about the fact that it was actually just a piece of paper, but society had attached an extra value to the specific printing and format of that piece of paper. If I took another piece of paper and wrote £10 on it then the value doesn't follow it. The message I was trying to send from this is that some pieces of paper are more important than others as society attaches a particular value to them.

Having then quickly established that all of the students (and the watching staff) wanted to have lots of £10 notes in their futures, the students suggested that the best way to do this was to get a good job, and we linked that to good qualifications. From there I steered the discussion towards my newly received A-level certificates. Again I was emphasising that they are all just pieces of paper, but the information on them and what it means to society makes them more important than some other pieces of paper. These certificates (pieces of paper) had helped me to secure a university place, and my plan was that this in turn would allow me to get a good job and earn lots of £10 notes.

In summing up I tried to emphasise the need for the students to work hard in their new school to maximise the value of all of their bits of paper to give them the best chance of having lots of £10 notes.

Important bits of paper stand up to time
I'll fully acknowledge that the assembly I've just described was a bit clumsy and heavily contrived - I was only 19 years old after all! However at various points in my life, and even more so since I have been a teacher, I keep coming back to the fact that we build our society around certain pieces of paper.

Beyond the A-levels I was able to talk about when I was 19 I now have my degree certificates, chartered engineer accreditation, teaching qualifications, marriage certificate, birth certificates of by children, and I could go on. Each one is technically just a piece of paper, but in its own way has a value way beyond that. Critically these pieces of paper endure over time and stand as proof of certain events even if the detail of the events themselves fade from memory.

For example, I have a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Bristol. To get this I studied topics such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, systems and control, electronics, and several more that don't spring immediately to mind. I took exams in these topics at various points during the course, and I graduated in 1999 with a certificate stating that I achieved first class honors.

I understood the course well at the time and given my results it is clear that I was able to demonstrate this in an exam, however if you now presented me with almost any of the questions I faced back then I would struggle. I can recall some small bits of information on some topics, but the vast majority has been forgotten due to the fact I stopped using it after finishing my degree (even though I immediately took up a job as an engineer)

Importantly though the qualification represented by my degree certificate (piece of paper) doesn't fade with time - it still has the same impact and value on every job or course application form I have ever completed. While my school qualifications, degree certificates and professional accreditations didn't actually secure any of my engineering or teaching jobs on their own, they were there as evidence when I completed the application forms (more bits of paper) that got me shortlisted.

What all of this demonstrates is that though my working knowledge of the subjects I've earned certificates for may have diminished, I have hard proof that I achieved a specified standard at some point in the past. This proof (piece of paper) has a value in society much greater than the detail of the topics needed to gain the certificates in the first place.

Hard evidence
What I'm getting at is that I think it is important to remember that when a student leaves our care the key thing they take with them as hard evidence of our impact on their life is the exam certificate we help them to achieve. This will be the case so long as society attaches a long term value to these pieces of paper.

Yes schools do so much more than just create exam results, and of course it's not always just about the grade, but grades are often the core currency of a student's future. Of course I hope that I encourage students to be interested in maths, and to be the best people they can be in the future. However if I've not also maximised their grade using whatever tools I have available to me then I've let them down in some way.

In 5 years time it is unlikely that anyone could tell based on hard evidence if that particular person was taught to the test or studied a broad and rich curriculum. They may also have just scraped their grade or just missed out on the grade above. The past student may well have forgotten how to add fractions, use the cosine rule and have thrown away their scientific calculator. They might have discovered that trick I showed them as an act of desparation to solve a particular type of exam question stops working when they apply it in all other contexts. Or they might realise why I forced them to derive that formula so that they knew where it had come from, even though it wasn't part of the exam.

Whatever route was taken to the qualification (be it educationally awesome or awful), the piece of paper it gives to the student is the thing that lasts the longest; it could well be of more future value to them than all the skills they used in order to earn it.

Most importantly
I intend to celebrate successes and learn from any disappointments. Then I'll consider how I can best help next year's cohort - their pieces of paper are still blank!

As always all thoughts welcome!