Mr Kent

A model for the learning process. And why it helps to have one. teacherhead.com/2020/03/10/a-m… So much snark (🙄🥱) but this has helped me so much as reference for talking about learning . Obviously if you have a better one.. ( NB for ages that attention arrow has gone both ways)

This is a really beautiful clip of what it looks like to read aloud with students… both in terms of how it can be used to build fluency and in terms of how it can help students appreciate the value of books. Thanks to @jessica_sliman of Whitefish, MT for sharing this beautiful video with us. You can read more about FASE Reading—the technique she’s using here—in Teach Like a Champion 3.0 or in the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. teachlikeachampion.org/blog/a-beautif…

I have written a free guide on responsive teaching for @UNESCO available here: unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0…

My list of people who have had a profound impact on my teaching: Doug Lemov Daniel Willingham Christine Counsell Thanos Gidaropoulos Dawn Cox Dylan Wiliam Efrat Furst Paul Kirschner Ruth Ashbee Daisy Christodoulou Carl Hendrick Anita Archer David Didau Tom Bennett Heather Fearn And that's just off the top of my head!

4/4 St Barts' and Bristol’s, Liverpool's and Glasgow's Royal Infirmaries were all funded in part by slave owners and traders. Red Hill pen in Jamaica supplied 10% of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s annual income until 1850: org.nhslothian.scot/aboutus/atlant…

I love mini whiteboards and probably use them too much, truth be told. This is why I appreciated the part of this discussion that took on when not to use them. Click the link below to listen. @AmberBHaven @AndrewWatsonTTB @SoLInTheWild @bamradionetwork bamradionetwork.com/track/maximizi…

I loved this post from Carl when I read it, and went into our footage to find examples. Check out the video here, and note the way the teachers try to keep their heads up and looking around the room. There's two aspects to that in these videos: 1. A general dispositions of looking around constantly 2. An increased emphasis on it immediately after responding to disruption (of any kind) A lot of the research focuses on teachers who have been doing this for years. It observes them, sees what they are doing, and describes it. But often the vibe is that they do it naturally, that their experience has just sort of led them to acting in a certain way. I think for many that might be right, but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that strategies like this can be taught and assimilated rapidly. For example, in this video Abi was in her ECT year, but has the "gaze" of a teacher with 10 years more experience than her. Great teaching isn't a mystery or a secret. It can be noticed, disassembled, communicated and implemented.

'I don't think Holyrood is family friendly' Dumfriesshire MSP Oliver Mundell shares his frustrations about the Scottish Parliament as he stands down. He's had two daughters since his election in 2016.

A student can complete an activity and still not learn the concept. If working memory is overloaded, the process never sticks. That distinction came up in a really interesting podcast discussion. @DylanWiliam @bamradionetwork bamradionetwork.com/track/zooming-…

It was a real honour to welcome Professor @dylanwiliam to The Totteridge Academy today 💪💪 Dylan has been extremely generous with his time, and has given me lots of feedback and useful pointers when designing Carousel Teaching. Being able to show him in person the lessons and teachers we've filmed in was a pretty great opportunity. I was particularly pleased with a 5 minute segment we saw in my colleague Ava's history lesson. She was working through a text about Charles I's early reign, and when she asked a student a question about the debt he inherited, realised the student didn't have a secure understanding of the concept of debt. She bounced it to another student, who gave a good answer, then she looped back to the first. She then pushed the question further, and asked someone else why Charles had such a debt, and that student didn't give a good answer. She moved the text to the side, and asked a similar diagnostic question on mini-whiteboards. Lots of students gave poor answers, so she asked for boards down, moved to a blank part of her OneNote, and re-explained the causes for Charles's debt, asking verbal questions throughout and looping back to the students who got the initial questions wrong. She rounded the segment off with a follow-up check on the mini-whiteboards. It was pretty ace, and showing it to Dylan was particularly apt, given the way that Ava was so expertly implementing formative assessment. It took me almost 10 years to learn how to do stuff like that, and Ava's in her second year of teaching. Super impressive, and again underscores why we chose to film teachers like her! Thank you Dylan for coming :)

🚨More minimally guided discovery learning. Again, it will look structured, effective, and “student-centered” with all the buzzy “voice” and “choice” bells and whistles attached. This will be sold as “creative.” Students create something. But creating something does not mean they engaged in creative thinking. Creative thinking depends on deep, domain-specific knowledge. Creative thinking is the ability to generate novel ideas within a domain. It’s not making a Roman God playing card. You can’t think creatively about Ancient Rome if you barely know Ancient Rome. In this model, students “learn” by exploring on their own, then immediately create and explain. That’s not depth. That’s surface-level production. What about probable misconceptions and misunderstandings which will be encoded, retrieved, and shared during this process? All while the teacher does what exactly? And the “Explain” column? Record your biggest surprise? Why are we spending instructional minutes recording surprise reactions instead of building knowledge? The opportunity cost is enormous. Time spent on low-knowledge creation is time not spent on explicit instruction, guided practice, and retrieval. And then we wonder why students graduate high school knowing so little. Discovery hides inside “creativity.” Poor proxy products mask thin superficial knowledge. “Sharing” convinces you students are truly engaged and care. Don’t let anyone fool you. This is minimally guided discovery learning.

We took a thoughtful look at mini whiteboards. Four disciplines. Practical examples. Clear limits. They’re not the end all be all, but this is a helpful conversation if you’re exploring the idea. @AmberBHaven @AndrewWatsonTTB @SoLInTheWild bamradionetwork.com/track/maximizi… #teachers

UNBELIEVABLY EXCITING RESOURCE DROP: Principles of Effective CPD, by me and @BenRiceTeach We've been working on this guide for months, and it's a concrete + nitty gritty manual to actually delivering CPD effectively. Get your copy at the link 👇 carousel-learning.com/resources/down…

Check. Adapt. A useful resource for teachers shared by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Many misunderstand, so pause and fix. Some are unsure, so adapt support. Most understand, so extend and support. Teachers make so many decisions each day, this resource offers helpful advice about what to do & when informed by evidence captured in a lesson.

I love, love, love revision days prior to an assessment. It’s how I attempt to effectively mitigated the “illusion of knowing”/Dunning-Krueger Effect in my students. I often say to them: “You don’t know what you don’t know until you know you don’t know it”. I say it so frequently a student suggested I make a sign and just point to it. So, of course, I made one. 😂 Here’s my general revision day procedure: 1️⃣ List all relevant information for topic/concept from memory in pencil. 2️⃣Check relevant readings, flashcards, handouts, etc. and revise in red pen. 3️⃣Turn and Talk with partners comparing/sharing and continue to revise in red pen. 4️⃣Cold call students to share information using targeted retrieval questions for information they just revised. Again, continue to revise in red pen based on what you hear from peers. 5️⃣ Provide additional models, diagrams, explanations, etc. using visualizer as needed. Make more red pen revisions if necessary. 6️⃣Wash, rinse, repeat for each concept on revision guide. 7️⃣Complete a success criteria checklist to identify key areas to focus on for more individual preparations using flashcards, revision guide, I can…statements, etc.

@SoLInTheWild Couldn’t agree more, what has pupil feedback been regarding this change? Have you explicitly explained the reasons for this change to them?

One of the biggest drivers in my shift toward explicit instruction has been simplifying everything. I used to try to gamify, activify, and engagify every lesson—bells, whistles, and all. It wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t especially effective. I taught under the impression that I had to “make it fun.” One of the best lessons I taught all year happened today, and here’s what it required: a visualizer, a blank outline map of the Caribbean, and all the critical content I know to explicitly teach my students with. That’s it. Add in lots of questions, choral response, turn-and-talk, concrete examples, active observation, and show calls, and you have everything you need for an effective and engaging lesson. In previous years, I would have turned this simple Caribbean geography lesson into a high-energy, activity-based experience: stations, a gallery walk, or some kind of puzzle or game. There would be movement, noise, and “engagement,” but most of the new information would be lost in the shuffle. Working memory would be so overloaded that very little would actually stick. Now I know teaching explicitly and simply is the most effective way to make learning happen.

Reading education blogs changed my practice, so I always want to try take the opportunity to share the love. Here are a few free blogs I've read recently that I thought were super, please share if you can! I work at a school that doesn't have merit points or rewards or anything like that, so this piece by @msrebeccabirch on intrinsic motivation really appealed to me: rebeccabirch.substack.com/p/on-chasing-t… We are in the midst of an SEND crisis, and part of the problem is outlined by @head_teach: that some schools have astonishingly higher numbers of students with SEND than others: matthewevanseducation.substack.com/p/magnetic-sch… @joel120193 is smashing out hit after hit on his blog, and this piece on the sheer amount of things teachers have to do resonated: joel120193.substack.com/p/the-60-minut… @mpershan wrote a typically scholarly, wide-ranging and sophisticated piece on implicit vs explicit learning, the memorisation of maths facts and much more. pershmail.substack.com/p/understandin… Next up are two posts on AI: @alex_crossman has written an excellent piece on the risks of AI to education. Our job is to get students' thinking hard, and AI's job is to get people thinking less hard. These aren't compatible, and we need to pull the brakes hard. powerfulknowledge.substack.com/p/its-time-to-… Whilst not strictly about education, Gary Marcus's entry here about the security risks of OpenClaw and other weird things is vital if we are to take internet and AI security seriously. garymarcus.substack.com/p/openclaw-aka… Of course, I've been blogging too, and you can check out my entries here: carouselteachlearnlead.substack.com As stated at the outset, please share if you can!

Teaching works, if schools actually do it. "Waiting for children to stumble upon the accumulated knowledge of civilisation is absurd and cruel," writes Carl Hendrick. tinyurl.com/4tnch47r @VodkaPundit @dylanwiliam @NateJoseph19 @MrZachG @MrDanielBuck @Dale_Chu @rpondiscio

@JoanneLeeJacobs @VodkaPundit @NateJoseph19 @MrZachG @MrDanielBuck @Dale_Chu @rpondiscio As Jerome Bruner pointed out over 60 years ago, the whole point of education is so that students don’t have to discover things for themselves but instead can, in Newton’s memorable phrase, stand on the shoulders of giants.